style of speech for themselves and their dependants; it was their monopoly; nobody who did not belong to the gentry and had not attended its schools could take part in literary or in administrative life.  The literary revolution introduced the language of daily life, the language of the people, into literature:  newspapers, novels, scientific treatises, translations, appeared in the vernacular, and could thus be understood by anyone who could read and write, even if he had no Confucianist education.

It may be said that the literary revolution has achieved its main objects.  As a consequence of it, a great quantity of new literature has been published.  Not only is every important new book that appears in the West published in translation within a few months, but modern novels and short stories and poems have been written, some of them of high literary value.

At the same time as this revolution there took place another fundamental change in the language.  It was necessary to take over a vast number of new scientific and technical terms.  As Chinese, owing to the character of its script, is unable to write foreign words accurately and can do no more than provide a rather rough paraphrase, the practice was started of expressing new ideas by newly formed native words.  Thus modern Chinese has very few foreign words, and yet it has all the new ideas.  For example, a telegram is a “lightning-letter”; a wireless telegram is a “not-have-wire-lightning-communication”; a fountain-pen is a “self-flow-ink-water-brush”; a typewriter is a “strike-letter-machine”.  Most of these neologisms are similar in the modern languages of China and Japan.

There had been several proposals in recent decades to do away with the Chinese characters and to introduce an alphabet in their place.  They have all proved to be unsatisfactory so far, because the character of the Chinese language, as it is at this moment, is unsuited to an alphabetical script.  They would also destroy China’s cultural unity:  there are many dialects in China that differ so greatly from each other that, for instance, a man from Canton cannot understand a man from Shanghai.  If Chinese were written with letters, the result would be a Canton literature and another literature confined to Shanghai, and China would break up into a number of areas with different languages.  The old Chinese writing is independent of pronunciation.  A Cantonese and a Pekinger can read each other’s newspapers without difficulty.  They pronounce the words quite differently, but the meaning is unaltered.  Even a Japanese can understand a Chinese newspaper without special study of Chinese, and a Chinese with a little preparation can read a Japanese newspaper without understanding a single word of Japanese.