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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 unwilling- 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.

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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-