TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2676, 4 December 1909, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

From all accounts there is little of <-he <•’ * heroic in the young king A Casual of Spam who is scarce.y Monarch likely 'to help this semidecadent nation to surmount the difficulties facing it in the present ‘international crisis. In the “English Review” Mr. T. AA r . Goode presents the following picture: biom Madrid the young King had. gone to San Sebastian for a day.; He returned for a Consejo de los —a meeting of the Cabinet. At the station Ministers received him, in official costume, with all the paraphernalia of Court etiquette.' To them appeared the King in deerstalker cap, lounge costume, free and 1 easy manner, full of details of his trip, his shooting, lus pleasures; and . . . there was no consejo. Such an utter disregard for the almost sacrosanct etiquette of the occasion, even more than the failure to appreciate the importance of the political situation, impressed everyone, and was commented on in the severest fashion, even by Ministerial supporters. The Sovereign is apparently utterly powerless to impress any course of action on his Ministers, in whose hands he is, to the public eye, a mere puppet. So that in the actual situation of antagonism to the. Government in general and to the present Administration in particular, there is nothing in the popular attitude towards the dynasty that can act as a counterpoise.

No more striking illustration of the revolution that has Educating the taken place in the Chinese governing class towards this question can be found than the opening in Pekin itself, of a public school under the highest auspices, for the sons of officials of the three highest grades in the Chinese bureaucracy. The “Nobles’ School,” as it is called, is attended at present by ninety-six pupils, and new premises are being built which will enable the number to be doubled. Adjoining the Nobles’ School, but within the same compound, is a separate building of even greater significance. It consists .of two large lecture rooms, in which lectures are. delivered every afternoon, on the one hand, to thirty-two young scions of the princely Manchu houses, and on the other, to sixteen youthful members of the. Imperial House of China. The Prince Regent, himself, from time to time, attends these lectures,and the influence which such exalt, ed patronage must exert can scarcely be exaggerated. Intimately connected with the educational movement are one or two social movements which also unuhdoubtediy indicate a very profound change in the moral, as wall as the intellectual, outlook of Chinese society. One is the opium movement which has for its object tlio limitation of the cultivation of the poppy and the sale of the drug. In the province of Miausi the noxious plant lias completely disappeared. Equally healthy is the giowth of the anti-foot-binding inclement, which'could make but liot:s headway so long as public opinion, amongst Chinese women themselves, was against it. Now that same public opinion is veering rapidly roiud, and for the same reasons which formerly p.rcmpted opposition. Chinese n others insisted upon subjecting their daughters to the torture of foot-binding licca« sc small feet were then the badge of respectability, and no Chinese gut with inr K -.f feet could hope to find a deceit husband. Now, with the gru-vth of education and the change in rho altitude of the Chinese mind towards foreign habits, the- value of small feet’ in the m.itrimonial market is falling rapid > a fid Chinese mothers are shrewd enough to forsee that within a few veers the demand will bo exclusively for large feet