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stand aloof from the trend of Chinese thought and aspirations; it would not merely be a com- mercial outpost from which Great Britain watches over the trade of her subjects in China; but it would be in the forefront of the movement which, sooner or later, will bring to the distraught and harassed peoples of China an end to revolution, an end to chaos and anarchy, a dawn of better things, of law and order and settled government, and which finally will carry that ancient land to a stage of development higher and nobler than it has hitherto attained, because Chinese ideals,-ethical, social and intellectual,-will have passed through the alembic of the moral, political and scientific teaching
of the West and come forth, not Europeanized, not Americanized, but embellished and enriched by assimilation of all that the East can profitably learn from the West.
In confident hope that these things shall be, I bid you farewell; and I pray that, when the twen- tieth century closes, a future Chancellor, standing in this place, and reviewing the proud story of the past, may be able to say that the foundation of the University of Hong Kong was indeed the dawn of a light in the Far East heralding the birth of an age better and more blest than that in which its founders lived.
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