It acts upon the frame of an antique society as a powerful dissolvent, heating weak brains, stimulating rash ambitions, raising inordinate expectations of which the disappointment is bitterly resented.

That these effects are well known even in Europe may be read in a remarkable French novel published not long ago, "Les Deracines," which, describes the road to ruin taken by poor collegians who had been uprooted from the soil of their humble village.

And in Asia the disease is necessarily much more virulent, because the transition has been more sudden, and the contrast between old ideas of life and new aspirations is far sharper.

From the report of an able French official upon the Indo-Chinese Colonies we may learn that the existing system of educating the natives has proved to be mischievous, needing radical reform.

Of the Levantine youths in the Syrian towns, the product of European schools, a French traveller writes (1909), "C'est une tourbe de declasses"; while in China some leaders of agitation for democratic changes in the oldest of all Empires are said to be those who have qualified by competitive examination for public employ, and have failed to obtain it.