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dependent governments. This might be an easy way to partition China; and it might, on the other hand, shock her discordant people into belligerent unity.

A WOBBLY BALANCE

A SIGH of relief doubtless rose from the breast of every patriotic son of France, and of all her other friends and relatives, when the news arrived that Parliament had at last levied the taxes necessary to balance the Budget. This was done at a dramatic night session when the Socialists withheld their votes and let the Parties of the Centre and Moderate Left carry through a measure that provides seventeen categories of new or increased taxes. These include an addition to the income tax in the form of a poll tax ranging from forty francs-about a dollar and a quarter a head on wage-earners with incomes of less than seven thousand francs a year, up to two per cent on incomes of over five hundred thousand francs; an extension of the sales tax to many classes of exports; a stamp tax ranging from one to three per cent on restaurant bills above twenty francs; a new tax on foreigners residing in the country, who will be required to pay into the Treasury at the end of each month a sum equal to twenty-five per cent of their rent; an increase of thirty per cent in the customs duties; an advance in the price of tobacco, which is sold by a Government monopoly; and the prospective addition of a petroleum monopoly to the list of such institutions already managed by the Government. The main thing is that the new law provides revenues theoretically adequate to meet the State's expenditures.

Nevertheless, all is not rosy yet on the French financial horizon. There is opposition at home. So substantial a

paper as Le Temps was horrified at the implacable war against private property on which the Government and Parliament had embarked, particularly at the odious provision requiring a citizen to take his oath that he has told the truth in his income-tax return, thus rendering it impossible henceforth to defraud the revenue without also committing perjury.

But the franc continues to fall, notwithstanding Draconic legislation and the honest and patriotic efforts of public-spirited citizens to stem the tide against it. In the first place, the Budget, which has just been passed, is itself an unknown quantity. It was drafted when the franc was worth between five and six cents, instead of between three and four cents as at present. Since prices have risen to correspond with this fall, the old estimates are unlikely to cover expenditures.

Many obstacles stand in the way of restoring the franc to its status of even a few weeks ago, to say nothing of its par before the war. Great industrial interests, especially those that are supplying foreign markets, profit by the present condition, which keeps wages at home lower than wages abroad. But what will happen when France's great population of rentiers, who are still living in the illusion that there will be a revalorization, discover that they have been hopelessly juggled out of five sixths or more of their capital?

No single thing, perhaps, would do more to tone up the franc than an announcement that France had concluded peace with Abd-el-Krim. Undoubtedly the Briand Cabinet is eager to come to terms with him, but its Spanish allies were for a time reluctant to do so, and announced in their official journal, El Noticero, early in April: "The Spanish Government considers that the moment has not yet come for

signing peace with Abd-el-Krim, whose prestige and power have not been sufficiently reduced.' Rumors of dissension between the two countries with regard to their Morocco policy have been rife for some time. Jealousy is Isaid to exist between the French and the Spanish military leaders, and France naturally feels that she is fighting somebody else's war, since she presumably would have had no trouble with the Riffi if the Spaniards had been able to take care of their part of Morocco. Just what terms are under discussion at the moment of writing is unknown, but those originally proposed by the French and Spanish delegates included the complete submission of the Riffian and Djebbala tribes to the Sultan, an exchange of prisoners, the complete disarming of the rebel tribes, and the exiling of Abd-el-Krim from the Rif.

MINOR NOTES

THE House of Commons is now considering a Roman Catholic Relief Bill. The proposed Act leaves undisturbed the provisions of the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement, which preserve the Succession of the Crown in the Protestant line and make it impossible for a Roman Catholic to be Lord Chancellor or to occupy a benefice of the Church of England; but it repeals nine ancient Acts of Parliament, most of which have become virtually a dead letter, such as a law of Edward VI forbidding books of the Catholic ritual 'ever to be kept in this realm.' Several of these statutes contain provisions forbidding gifts or legacies to Catholic religious institutions or orders. Apparently a Roman Catholic technically violates the laws of Great Britain at the present time whenever he appears in public in the habit of a religious order.

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UNCLE SAM BARNUM. "They 'll sure think it the Star of Bethlehem and not a booby-chaser.'

Travaso, Rome

A SACRIFICED GENERATION 1

CHINA'S STUDENT VICTIMS OF A HYBRID CULTURE

BY PAUL SCHEFFER

SINCE coming to China I have visited many universities, where I have been particularly interested in learning how the students live. Their lodgings form a striking contrast to the magnificent libraries, assembly halls, gymnasiums, and laboratories with which those institutions are so generously provided. The question intrudes itself, why should huge sums be spent for such buildings while the young people who use them must sleep and study in cramped, dark, dank, cellarlike Chinese lodgings? It is a psychological question how far the traditional low scale of living of the young Chinaman should be permitted to continue while he is surrounded by all the luxuries of a typical well-endowed American college. Moreover, when students are forced to sleep four or six together in cavelike closets so small that their beds touch each other, the effect of these confined quarters on their health must be considered. And this means more than physical health alone.

No teacher with whom I have talked in China, with a single and not very convincing exception, has failed to lament the radicalism of the students

a radicalism that is not only political but also social. I do not attach much weight to all the talk about foreign influence in such matters. In China, as in other countries, such explanations

1 From Berliner Tageblatt (Liberal daily), March 26

are chiefly an excuse for dodging facts. One reason why these students are radical, in my opinion, is that they must live in the miserable way they do, in the cellarlike dens in which I have found them in both South and North China. Such surroundings undoubtedly influence their opinions. They live as a proletariat. What they see all around them fills them with social discontent; and it is significant that the first phase of social injustice against which they protest is bad housing. To make matters worse, most of China's universities have been set down in the congested quarters of her great cities.

It is very interesting to call upon these students in their lodgings. I have been surprised and saddened to see how little of Old China their rooms contain. Here and there, perhaps, one sees a survival of artistic taste, such as a fairly good Chinese painting on a wall; but side by side with it invariably hangs one of those impossible, tasteless European color prints with which the Commercial Press of Shanghai, a Chinese firm which does remarkably fine press work, has flooded the whole country. Old standards have been undermined undermined - hopelessly so hopelessly so in the conscious life of these young men. They have lost touch with their ancient culture, and they have not gained a real touch with the new culture they seek. They waver between the two, and none of these sixteen- and twenty

year-old boys will ever get a solid intellectual footing in the world.

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Every student I have visited has had a little shelf of books in his room half of them textbooks, half books selected to suit his personal taste. I have been struck by the amount of English as well as Chinese poetry, and of English history, these young men read. American works are not as common as one would expect from America's influence here. And then photographs one or more sweethearts, and pictures of friends. It seems to be bad form to display photographs of one's parents or relatives; they are never visible. Then there will be a number of little trifles and curios, practically all from some other country—oftentimes views of great European and American cities. Over one student's bed I saw hanging pictures of Western statesmen from Cæsar to Lincoln and Bismarck. A few suggestions of American college life - bright-colored caps and sweaters are generally lying are generally lying about. And then a very striking thing, sometimes vehemently denied by their teachers: over every third bed, on an average, hangs a picture of Sun Yatsen, and over every fourth bed, I should say, a picture of Lenin or Trotskii. Photographs of Lenin as a baby are particularly popular. So these universities, which owe their resources so largely to the munificence of the United States and Europe, face toward Moscow.

In fact, nearly all of them receive financial assistance from America, and many are entirely supported from that country. But Western culture, when transplanted to China, becomes something different from what it is in its own home. That, of course, is to be expected, but it is a fact we do not sufficiently ponder. We do not pause to consider what the result is to be if our Western lands, with America leading

at a Ford-output pace, refashion thousands and thousands of the sons of this unfathomable nation into a distorted image of their own children.

Numerically, returned students from America are the predominant type among these products of export culture. They are not particularly popular either with foreigners or with their own people. America has taught them a certain theoretical knowledge, - often inadequate enough in practice, — and has given them a veneer of college spirit, and also pert manners that emphasize the difference between New York and Peking. They acquire that peculiar American push and aggressiveness that are often so disconcerting even to Europeans. Added to this is apt to be a passion for sports.

China has been appalled, moreover, to learn that her young sons, when they get back from the United States, although they have no inclination to throw bombs, are nevertheless nihilists at heart. They return convinced that their country is hopelessly behind the times, superstitious, and out of datethat as it exists to-day it should be wiped off the map. They see how incapable China is of competing with Western science and enterprise in any field of thought or action. They have absolute faith in Western ability, but rarely have they actually acquired it. They come home feeling that China is on the other side of the globe. This attitude is aggravated by the fact that the returned student's native land no longer affords him opportunities that measure up to his ambitions. He is dissatisfied. More than that, he has also had his eyes opened to the shady side of American civilization. Should he later rise to high office, as he often does just now in Peking, he is seldom a friend to the hospitable country that gave him his education, and is quite ready to pay back her favors in bad

coin. Nevertheless, he is not happy in China.

People say that this inner contradiction is not so strong in students who have been educated in Europe, especially if they have attended institutions in small towns. The tempo of European life differs less from that of China than from that of America. Europe has more repose, more depth. The two older cultures have a quicker understanding of each other. But there is always danger that the powerful influence of the West, in whatever continent it is exerted, will estrange the young Chinaman from his native land, blind him to her real merits, and divide him against himself. No one sees these dangers more clearly than do the best native teachers in China, most of whom have acquired their education in the United States or Europe. Consequently Chinese opinion is experiencing a strong reaction against the returned student, against his type of mind a reaction that originated among the Chinese themselves but that has the sympathy and support of many foreign teachers in this country.

As a result the conviction is rapidly growing that the modern Chinese university must not confine itself merely to familiarizing its students with Occidental thought and science, but that it must also foster a purely Chinese culture competent to criticize discriminatingly the culture of the West. A renaissance of Chinese classicism equipped with modern scientific methods is beginning. I should hasten to add that this movement is still in its initial stages; but it has indubitably begun. For example, I hear it said everywhere that young Chinamen must not be sent abroad, to Harvard or to Freiburg, until they are thoroughly grounded in modern Chinese philosophy and scholarship.

The university student who has been educated in Western schools in China presents a somewhat different problem, but one quite as difficult as that of the returned student, or even more so. While away from home, at least, the latter has not been embittered by a constant conflict between the new and the old. He has unconsciously passed from a Chinese mental and physical environment into that of the West. But the young Chinaman at home is in continuous contact with two worlds, and never for a moment can he forget the conflict between them. An American tutor in a large university supported with funds from the United States told me that his students, when they came back from vacation, were generally worn out and unfit for study until they had had time to recuperate. They had drunk too deeply during their vacation of the already unfamiliar Chinese life, with its irregular hours and its varied amusements, and they had been constantly harassed by the differences between their own new way of living and thinking and those of their families families the universal tragedy of the younger generation multiplied a hundredfold. Let me repeat, parenthetically, that the cultural traditions of this country have deep roots-far deeper in many ways than our own traditions have in us Europeans or Americans. In spite of these difficulties, however, I imagine that it is better, more natural, more wholesome, for a young Chinaman to acquire his Western education at home, without transplanting to another continent.

I have observed that the students from the warm southern provinces are more active, enterprising, and intellectual, if you will, than their northern brethren, but that they seldom have strong nerves. They are as a rule emaciated, high-strung, excitable, easily worried, and prone to discontent.

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