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for foreigners, but are in fact now sinking into a minority as Japanese girls are crowding them out of favour. As regards the Eurasian girls, the offspring of these illicit connections, a most important change has of late taken place, in that these girls, who formerly used to become concubines in turn, are now commonly brought up respectably and married to Chinese husbands who themselves have received an English education in the local Boys' Schools. I am therefore convinced that there is not the slightest danger of the experience of Bishop SMITH'S Committee of 1865 I have re- being repeated in the case of the proposed Government Girls' School. marked above that the girls whom I expect to attend the proposed School are, practically speaking, the sisters of the boys now attending the Government Central School, and 1 am certain that now-a-days hardly any of the boys of that School have sisters who are, or ever will be, the kept mistresses of foreigners.
5. Another plausible objection which has been raised against offering an English education to girls, the vast majority of whom are Chinese who never hear English spoken within their respective house-holds, is that such a foreign education is in their case uncalled for and useless. They do not want it,' I am told, and if they get it, they are no better off for it.'
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That the English education which I desire the Governinent to offer to the public is urgently called for and will be eminently useful in the case of European, Indian and other non-Chinese and non-Catholic girls, who at present have practi- cally no School to go to, is, I believe, generally admitted but with the significant observation that the number of such girls is comparatively small. I admit that their unmber is small, but I plead that the smallness of the number is no reason why the Government, which makes such liberal provision for the equally small number of boys of the same classes, and provides the girls of Chinese aliens with a gratuitous Chinese education, should make no provision whatever to put an English education within the reach of the daughters of loyal English and Indian subjects of Her Majesty.
Now as to the allegation that in the case of the vast majority of Chinese girls in the Colony an English education is not wanted nor called for by the girls them- selves or their parents, I might demur to the statement and assert that a certain, though indeed limited, number of these people do call for an English education, and that the demand for it, though small at present, is sure to be called forth in steadily increasing force by the supply, but I prefer to let this argument be worked out by the future educational history of the Colony, and admit that, generally speaking, Chinese girls, their mothers, and in many cases their fathers also, do not call for English feinale education. But what else would you expect? In the case of education, the consumer never is the proper judge of the article he requires to be supplied with. The public opinion of a semi-civilized people cannot be accepted, If the in the matter of education, as the standard of what ought to be done. Chinese were left to themselves, their girls would, generally speaking, be left with- out education altogether, until such education becomes an effective means of earning a livelihood, and I freely admit that at present an English education does not put the same facilities for earning money in the way of a Chinese girl as it does for a Chinese boy. The money value of female education is at present next to nil. Well then, are we to force English education upon unwilling Chinese girls, or is there, apart from force, any prospect of their going in for it willingly? I do not propose the use of any force or compulsion whatever, but on the contrary I propose to admit to English tuition only those Chinese girls who have been attending an ordinary Chinese School for at least two or three years and who are willing to pay for their English tuition a reasonable proportion of the expenses involved. And the grounds for my firm expectation that this can be done are these. The Chinese, like the natives of India, are perfectly ready to respond, with zeal and readiness, to an external impulse involving a radical change in their habits, provided only that they are assured of its beneficial tendency. This has been the universal experience of educationists in India and is amply testified to, in these very words, by the Report of the Indian Education Commission of 1883 (see, for instance, Chap. X, 601). But we have had experience in Hongkong of a signal case in point. The idea of giving girls a school education, as a necessary part of their training for life, is entirely foreign to Chinese babits of thought, and was considered a mon- strosity by Chinese fathers and mothers, residing in Hongkong, but fifteen years ago. Nevertheless, in response to the offers and solicitations placed in their way by the Missionary Girls' Schools, set up in all parts of the Colony under the powerful stimulus of the Grant-in-Aid system, these Chinese fathers and mothers have now
come to regard it as the right and proper thing that every Chinese mother, who can afford to provide the needful decent clothing and who can spare the domestic services of the child, should send her girl to a Grant-in-Aid or Government School for three or four years at least, to learn reading and writing in Chinese and plain sewing and to be trained in habits of order and discipline. Observing the gratuitous and beneficial character of the indigenous education offered in these Schools, these Chinese fathers and mothers have come to throw all their national prejudices against female education to the winds, and have become zealous supporters of Mission Schools in spite of the, to them objectionable, dose of Christian teaching which they have to submit to as a quid pro quo in consideration of their having to pay no school fees, and which they do submit to, often with bad grace, being conscious of exposing their children's minds to an influence, which, however weak they may deem it, is yet professedly hostile to their own religious beliefs.
Now what has been done in Hongkong to conquer native prejudice against female education generally, can likewise be done to overcome the present nawilling- ness to go in for English education in the case of native girls, especially as the Government will abstain from any interference with native religious beliefs.
But this brings me to the second question, as to whether any beneficial results will be derived from giving Chinese girls an English education. I have already remarked that the money value of such an education is, in the case of Chinese girls, next to nothing. So it is. But education has other beneficial results than merely improving the money-making capabilities of men or women, and the Chinese are as wide-awake to the importance of education as a factor in this modern high-pressure life of competition. There is, in the first instance, that quickening of the intellectual nature which is produced by exercising the mind in the ordinary subjects even of a Chinese education and which is a specially prominent result when a Chinese girl receives an English education. There is, in the second instance, the training and disciplining the minds of the children in habits of truthfulness, uprightness, woman- liness, and the mutual subordination of individual will and interest to the demands of the common weal, which is the sure result of a properly organized and disci- plined English Girls' School. Now these intellectual and moral influences of education work with the certainty of a law of nature. Wherever they are applied
to female education, they have always produced, and are bound always to produce, their adequate result, which is an improvement in the social and political status of woman. Sociology has explained the reasons, but I am here merely concerned with the fact, that in every country of the world, where woman occupies a degraded position, the education of women is neglected. In China the education of men is systematically refined and essentially scholastic, whilst the education of women is systematically confined to what is domestically serviceable or sensually amusing. The natural consequence of this gap, existing in all but exceptional cases, between the education of men and women in China, is the reign of polygamy, a low state of morality among men, whilst women are bought and sold as the lawful goods and chattels of their owners. Now here in Hongkong, where for twenty-seven years the Government has annually spent ever increasing sums of money to give Chinese boys an English education, wondering all the time why this continuous teaching of English produces so little visible effect in the direction of spreading a knowledge of the English language in the Colony, and why in so many cases the giving of an English education to Chinese boys appears eventually to deteriorate rather than to improve their morals, the Government have, by excluding Chinese girls from the onward movement of English education in the Colony, systematically widened the gulf separating men and women, and, by leaving the men brought up with a knowledge of English to marry wives devoid of that knowledge, methodically prevented the spread of the English language in Chinese families. I do not mean to say that the deterioration in morals, which has been observed in Chinese youths who received an English education, is entirely or largely due to the neglect of giving Chinese girls also an English education. There are other causes at work with which I have nothing to do here. But what I mean to say is, that the giving of an English education to Chinese boys only, and not to girls likewise, has naturally contributed to deteriorate the relative position and moral influence of woman in the Chinese social organism as represented in Hongkong. I have repeatedly heard Chinese mothers, whose sons were educated at the Government Central School and subse- quently sent to England or Scotland to finish their education, that their educa- tion gave them a contempt for un-educated Chinese women and that only in exceptional cases Chinese girls could be found who would be fit help-mates for them in domestic and conjugal respects.
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