passed the Higher Examinations (for no Examination is any security against flashy and unreal modes of thinking); I should ask, first, whether the Jewesses who attend the school improve or deteriorate by being there; whether they are found to be, on the whole, a good or a bad influence. Every country and every school gets, as some French writer has said, the Jews which it deserves. A school or a country where Jews are found to be a deteriorating influence is one where public opinion is judging of progress by a false standard.
So it is on a larger scale. A Nation may seem to be rushing onward in a line which is supposed to be that of culture; but if it turns out that the Asiatics who take part in that culture drift out of sight of their own religion, if they lose their perception of the meaning of their own past, they are leaving the line of true progress; and whoever is sharing the same kind of education is leaving it along with them. Whatever culture produces that effect on Asiatics is deadening and stupefying for all parties; it may look like improvement, but it partakes of the nature of white paint over corruption. It will end by leading all parties towards impiety and vulgarity—the Asiatics first, of course; but ultimately everybody else as well. But if Asiatics can throw themselves heartily into the culture of a country without losing hold of their own religions, we may be sure that that culture is founded on something approximately like the true laws of human development. If the result of successive changes in an Educational code is that Asiatics can make excursions into the Science, the Literature, the Philosophy of their age, and come easily back, with fresh energy and fresh clearness, to the work of advancing
