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less effective as time passed. The University was never framed on the essential scale. British Governments and the British people have never fully understood either University functions or University finanec. Hongkong has been no exception in this respect though it has been a more than usually obvious victim of this national failing. The growth of aggressive nationalism in China itself diminished the FLOW of students already kept to small dimensions by the unfortunate fact that the cost of living in Hongkong was higher than on the mainland. This last discrepancy was increased by the growth of a laudable feeling that linked patriotism with poverty and caused the Chinese of the new age to bear with patience, and even to welcome, conditions that the student: and staff of a British Colony could not be expected to accept, since they naturally compared their situation with that of their fellows in other British lands and institutions. The need for the University to serve the Colony that house 1
it and to cater for the requirements of students from overseas again diminished the resources it could spare for its larger and more vital task, and increased the discrepancy between costs within China and without. The language difficulty proved another bar, for the Colony was slow to accept the modified Chinese developed to be a common medium for all Ching. Finally the growth of Chinese Universities in the present century at once provided local attractions of comparable and latterly even, in a few examples of higher standards, and intensified the local pride which caused pressure to be brought to bear on good Chinese students to attempt to obtain their higher education in their own lani. At the same time British and other Universities overseas skimmed off some of the cream and with them Hongkong University could not compete. Sources such as the Boxer Indemnity Fund and the great American philanthropic educational foundations assisted to finance a large proportion of such students as sought a university carcer external to China.
All these factors operated against the fulfilment of the Lugard plan, but it need not have failed, as it largely di!, if imagination had been shown in the financing of our own University. In the University field Britain has something to give that can stand comparison with, and hold its own against, anything in the world, That this is so, is realised in China as elsewhere.
It is not too late to recapture lost ground. Several of the factors enume rated above will not operate to such a marked extent in the post-war world. Already there is evidence that the Chinese people feel that they owe a debt to Britain an i that there must be aspects of the minds that produced the spirit of 1940 which have much in common with, and might well prove akin to, their own. The first aggressive phase of the national rejuvenation is giving place to something deeper and calme. and more mature. New China is sure of herself as she never was before the war. She has proved herself in crises and her aggressive neighbour is, chiefly through her own resistanc., no longer a menace. Knowing what she is and has herself, she can afford without risk of loss of face to look to her late allies for much she does not possess.
She is likely to welcome rather than view with suspicion or resentment a first class University on part of her own home - land only temporarily alienated; an institution indeed, which is likely eventually to be handed over to her, lock stock and barrel, with all the reputation it will have gained. With the di sappe arance of the overseas Chinese, Hongkong University
policy