"foreign" schools established by the government. These schools were not only free of tuition but also provided students with room and board and a small amount of spending money. In 1898 Lusin entered the Naval Academy at Nanking and later the College of Railway and Mines in the same city. Here for the first time he came into contact with Western learning. He was particularly excited by Yen Fu's translation of Huxley's Evolution and Ethics which appeared in 1898. Early in 1902 he went to Japan on a government scholarship, and after studying the Japanese language in a preparatory school in Tokyo, entered the Sendai Medical College in 1904. But he did not finish his medical course. The apathy of the Chinese in general toward the Russo-Japanese War (which was fought, it will be recalled, on Chinese soil) disgusted him and made him realize that it was just as important to stir a people out of its mental and spiritual lethargy as to cure its physical ills. He decided to give up the study of medicine and to devote his life to literature, which was, he was convinced, the best means of awakening the Chinese people.
His own preference had always been, as a matter of fact, literary matters. He was an omnivorous reader even as a child and had the industrious habit of the Chinese scholar of copying out extensive passages from the books he read, sometimes entire works that were not easily available or which he could not afford. After his arrival in Japan he devoted all his spare moments to reading Japanese translations of important European works, especially history, philosophy, and literature.
But he was, unfortunately, too far ahead of his time. His generation as a whole were still under the delusion that a new political window dressing was all that was necessary for the
