in China during the last dozen years.
The changes in the new education among women promise to be even more sweeping than those among men. Dr. Martin, expressing the sentiments then in vogue, said, as far back as 1877, “that not one in ten thousand women could read.” In 1893 I began studying the subject, and was led at once to doubt the statement. The Chinese in an offhand way will agree with Dr. Martin. But I found that it was a Chinese woman who wrote the first book that was ever written in any language for the instruction of girls, and that the Chinese for many years have had “Four Books for Girls” corresponding to the “Four Books” of the old regime, and that they were printed in large editions, and have been read by the better class of people in almost every family. In every company of women that came to call on my wife from 1894 to 1900, there was at least one if not more who had read these books, while the Empress Dowager herself was a brilliant example of what a woman of the old regime could do. Where the desire for education was so great among women, that as soon as it became possible to do so, she launched the first woman’s daily newspaper that was published anywhere in the world, with a woman as an editor, we may be sure that there was more than one in ten thousand during the old regime that could read. What therefore may we expect in this new regime where women are ready to sacrifice their lives rather than that the school which they are undertaking to establish shall be a failure?