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abiding product of a nation's past, and he challenges China and the world to show that those who are going to try and guide the China of the future can afford to ignore its momentous past.
The University's Future.
The Balance Sheet for 1928 has not yet been drawn up, but I am not looking forward to it with any misgiving. We are paying our way, but the future is dark and uncertain. The Finance Com-
mittee has sounded a note of warning, that unless fresh sources of revenue be discovered, the prospective pecuniary resources of the University will not, in a few years time, cover its financial commitments. And no University can stand still. When the Legislature of Hongkong passed the University Ordinance of 1911, it committed itself and the Colony to the establishment of a University "for the promotion of Art, Science and learning, for the formation of the character of students of all races, nationalities and creeds, and, for the maintenance of good understanding with the neighbouring country of China." At the same time the Legislature of Hong Kong proclaimed to the world that the standards of its University would not be below the standards of Universities in Great Britain. But the cost of British Universities has increased enormously since the war, and the contributions to Universities, not only from His Majesty's Treasury, but also from the local Education Authorities, have increased out of all proportion to the receipts from other sources.
The University's Poverty.
A good friend of the University said to me the other day, "The University is always passing round the hat. We are getting a little tired of this shameless mendicancy." So am I. The accredited author of the Hitopadesa, Narayan, wrote that "of poverty and death, poverty is the worse; death is slight pain, but poverty is exceeding grievous." The burden of the University's poverty is the burden which the Legislature of Hong Kong has laid upon us, for we are only trying to carry out the Legislature's expressed wishes. If we can't have money, at least let us have goodwill. We can bear the burden, but let the saddle be light. No one realises more acutely than I do, the tremendous difficulties which underlie the maintenance and effective development of this University. His Excellency the Chancellor has just returned from fighting our cause in London with a tenacity which nothing but the strongest conviction, nay, devotion, could have maintained. If
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all hope of getting help from the Boxer Indemnity Fund must be finally and irrevocably abandoned, the whole problem of the University's future will have, before long, to be faced here in Hong Kong. I hope that I am not being unduly egotistical, if I suggest in all humility that when all the issues are realised, the problem of the University's future will be seen to be one of the biggest administrative problems with which the Government of Hong Kong will be faced.
"But all this," I hear the practical man retaliate, "is rhetoric: the sort of stuff which a Vice Chancellor with nothing of practical utility to propose serves up on an occasion like this. We are a commercial community and Hong Kong is a place for trade; not for taradiddles about culture or the maintenance of British prestige in China by increasing the output of Hong Kong University graduates. Show us how your University is going to enhance the prosperity of Hong Kong; show us the standard of value in virtue of which the University claims ever increasing financial support."
What America is Doing.
"My friend," I meekly reply, "you are a realist and frankly I find your views refreshing. You at least know your own mind. Your position is, that the less spent on education in Hong Kong the better for Hong Kong's prosperity. I do not agree." Time alone will show which of us was right. Meanwhile, it does occur to me as strange that the people of the United States of America who, I always understood, are pretty good at business, should take such a diametrically opposite view. They spend quite a lot of money on education in China. They have recently established a China Institute in America and among the declared objects of that Institution is the creation of fellowships and scholarships to enable not only Chinese to study in American Colleges and Universities, but also Americans to study in China. They have also recently established and generously endowed the Harvard- Yenching Institute for Chinese studies. And, as to these standards of value, I am in a small way a student of history, and I have not gathered that the foresight of any particular generation in the matter of the value or prospective influence on the world of its contemporary personalities and events has always been remarkable for its acuteness.
John Ruskin died in 1900-a very old man. To the practical man of his generation, John Ruskin was an ineffectual, scolding, sweet-tempered, childish angel. But to John Ruskin it was an
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