CO129-180 - Public Offices & Others - 1877 — Page 447

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which he has been taught is spoken, he will be able at once to make himself understood, and will soon become familiar with it. And when one dialect bas been mastered, it is comparatively easy to go on to the acquisition of others, for the names of the cha- racters in them-that is, the names of things and ideas-vary according to certain general rules and analogies.

What we call the mandarin dialect is spoken over a greater part of the country than any other; it is used also everywhere by the mandarins, the members of the magisterial or governing class, and more or less by a considerable proportion of the literati. Students, therefore, who intend making proof of their acquirements in China itself should give to this dialect their chief attention, and the native assistants to Chinese Chairs, such as we have seen are employed in Paris, should be men who speak mandarin purely.

Thus far my main object has been to vindicate the constituting of the Chinese Chair, showing that in the relations at which we have arrived with China- relations political, religious, and commercial-there is found for it a good raison d'etre. Allow me further to mention two other considerations which should have brought such a Chair into existence long ere this. They are the history and literature of China, and the nature of its language, considered in themselves.

My idea of a university is that it is a great institution for the promotion of learning and education. To the country in which it is established it owes the duty of imparting to its youth the highest knowledge which the age enjoys on all subjects belonging to the culture of the mind and the formation of the cha- racter. The Chinese philosopher Mencius wrote, in

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the fourth century before Christ, that one of the three things in which the man of noblest qualities and highest aim delights, is to have under him the most talented youths of the kingdom, and to teach and nourish them. This is a delight which hardly any individual can enjoy, but it is largely the pri- vilege of a great University like this.

Now the number and range of subjects embraced in the field of study must increase from age to age, to keep pace with the researches of science and the results of various investigations. Of science in connexion with China I will not speak, but its history and literature ought no longer to be excluded from a scheme of university education. True they have not affected our history and literature as those of Greece and Rome have done, to say nothing of the Semitic nations; but they will be found rich in interest and instruction. There in the south-eastern corner of Asia the people had existed for thousands of years, little more than known by name to the nations which were acting the great drama of history in the West,-acting it in earnest, and not in show or play. As Virgil, towards the dawn of our Christian era, spoke of the Britons as entirely divided from the rest of the world, so a writer might have written of the Chinese three centuries ago. And yet they had bad their local habitation and name from the remote date which I have indicated, existing in a state of high civilisation, with a very various literature, bound together by social principles of great strength and virtue, and having increased till their number was double the population of the great Roman empire in its palmiest days. It is not possible but that there should be lessons of the

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