At the outset the men in charge of the Company's educational work realized that the only effective and right way of educating Chinese children was to apply to them the compulsory educational system which was in force with the Japanese children. To practice this was no easy matter. With the century-old customs and the fixed modes and ideas of life and education which the Chinese had, it was practically impossible to get the children out to school for many years. The Company solved the knotty problem in the end, however, and in the simplest manner imaginable: it made schools and schooling so irresistibly attractive to the natives that they could not keep their children away from them. It took time, but the Company sold the idea to the Chinese in a big way. When I was in Manchuria last year the only problem keeping the educational department of the Company up nights was how to meet the demands of the Chinese children for educational facilities.

Out in the country districts far from schools, the South Manchuria Railway Company provided free passes for school children. Moreover it fashioned the schedules in such a manner that trains stopped near the schools as well as at their regular stations. Latest reports put the number of school children at 94,000 and the number of teachers at 263. All the benefits offered to these, it must be kept always in mind, are in addition to the educational facilities given by the Japanese Administration of the Kwangtung Leased Territory and those given by the Chinese authorities.

In addition to the above, the Company has many technical training schools, which turn out the railway and mining engineers and trainmen-the mining school at Fushun for example and the training schools at Seoul, Chosen, and other large centers. The Company also established, in 1913, a training school for teachers. In

Sewing Class in the Girls' High School at Fushun

1915 it changed the name to Educational Research Institution.

While at Mukden I had an exceptional opportunity of examining, rather critically and at leisure, the Company's great medical institution, which had just been raised to the full status of a university. It stood in the center of the New Town: its buildings covered something like four large city blocks adjoining the ground of the Company's Central Hospital at Mukden, which looked down upon the Central Circle to the north of it. The University was housed in an imposing brick building. A new wing to the main building had been in course of construction and was nearing completion at the time of my visit.

The most remarkable feature of the University, however, was not its cluster of buildings, which might join the company of Columbia structures on Morningside Heights in New York City without apology or blush. It was in the specimen-room of the University. In it is a collection of medical data on one particular subject which is without peer in the world. The incomparable wealth of scientific data collected there is on the Pneumonic Plague.

"Medical Manchuria was thrown into a wild thrill of excitement," says Dr. M. Tsurumi, one of the learned experts of the Hygienic Administration of the South Manchuria Railway Company, "as the remarkable news was flashed over it to the effect that on August the 30th, 1920, a couple of Russian girls at the small village of Abakait in North Manchuria were attacked simultaneously with the pneumonic plague and died in a day." This outbreak claimed 7,700 victims before it was through.

Ten years before that, in the winter of 1910-1911, the same plague swept over Manchuria and centered the

eyes of the whole medical world upon her: it resulted in assembling the International Plague Conference at Mukden, Manchuria, following the end of the epidemic.

The collection at the University is the result of the first-hand investigations by specialists of the two epidemics the results of thousands of experiments and observations of the victims through all the stages of development of the plague. The pneumonic plague was not unknown to Europe; but the cases there had occurred in the days when medical science was in the keeping of professional barbers. Therefore the University is the custodian of the only scientific collection of data on the plague in all the world to-day: the Mecca to which all students of the world must come for knowledge of this terror. There is no other place they could get it. The University is the training-field for the medical administrators of Manchuria as well as of the S. M. R. Zone.

LOOKING AFTER PUBLIC HEALTH

When the South Manchuria Company took over the line, in April, 1907, there was just one military hospital in Dairen. Nine others scattered at various points were mere branches, medical stations without the equipment of a full-fledged hospital in the modern sense. To-day there are fifteen hospitals at fifteen population-centers of South Manchuria: at Dairen, Mukden, Liaoyang, Changchun, Tiehling, Kaiyuan, Kungchuling, Penhsihu, Antung, Yingkou, Fushun, Wafangtien, Anshan, Ssupingkai, and Kirin. At each of the collieries of Fushun and Yentai the Company maintains a medical consultation station, and in addition there are six branch hospitals, some of which are in the old Chinese towns. The greatest of these hospitals is at Dairen. It is the model institution of the kind, having nine highly specialized departments. It can look after 450 patients at one time.