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of great promise, and the loss to the country may be serious enough to be worth consideration.

From this it may be seen that those who advocate the increase of higher schools have reason to back their arguments.

Of the successful candidates for admission into the higher schools, there were 8 Kwazokus (nobles), 543 Shizokus (descendants of the bannerets of the feudal times, or Samurai), and 1,047 Heimins. The percentages are: Kwazoku, 0.5; Shizoku, 34.0; Heimin, 65.5.

Excluding the island of Taiwan (Formosa), the population of Japan, according to the latest census, is 43,758,415 (excluding foundlings and unregistered prisoners under sentence), of which the Kwazoku number 4,551; the Shizoku, 2,105,698; and Heimin, 41,548,166; so that the percentages are as follows: Kwazoku, 0.01; Shizoku, 4.81; Heimin, 95.18.

Setting aside the Kwazokus, out of every 100 successful candidates, at most only 5 should be Shizokus. Of 451 graduates of the Tokyo Imperial University last July, 219 were Shizokus and 228 were Heimins, thus showing the same discrepancies of the ratios of the graduates to the total number of the two classes of people. The cause of this is not far to seek. The Shizokus had been the governing class during the feudal system until the Restoration, in the year 1868. Tradition in a Shizoku family cannot but make its sons ambitious—a fact that makes them aspire for higher education, as the latter alone can raise them above the mass of the people. Another cause may be found in the following fact: Most of the higher officials, and a great many successful professional men, are of Shizoku extraction, and their sons, brothers, and relatives and friends, are apt to desire to enter official or professional lives, for which, of course, higher education is a necessary qualification.

Shizokus are generally very poor, and yet, in spite of it, some of them with slender means of subsistence manage to have their sons obtain a University education. This may seem to be utterly inexplicable to the uninitiated; it is, however, quite easy of explanation. In the first place, if a young man distinguishes himself in the middle school, the members of his family are generally ready to make any sacrifice or to undergo any hardships to secure his education. A case has been known where a sister, to aid in defraying the cost of her younger brother’s education, has entered the profession of Geisha—a profession which, while not an honourable one, is not necessarily a degrading one. This may be, perhaps, an extreme case, but many cases occur in which the parents of University students lead hand-to-mouth lives for their sons. Then, there are a great many student aid societies, whose function is to lend sufficient means to those students in higher schools or