Mission Notes

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · May 26, 1904

THE first college for women in Japan is only two years old, yet it already has more than eight hundred pupils. It is an undenominational school: all religions are tolerated, but none are taught.

THE Protestant Episcopal mission at Kiu-kiang, China, finding the work hampered by the lack of women workers, has decided to insist that before men are admitted to baptism, they must show interest in the conversion of their wives, and make some real effort to bring them also under instruction.

THE Missionary for April mentions a case where four heathen women in China called a meeting to take action in unbinding the feet. Fifty women present promised to unbind their own feet, and have to refrain from binding the feet of their daughters. The fact that the meeting was called and conducted by heathen women shows the extent to which ideas are at last entering the most conservative of nations.

JAPAN has 4,302,623 children in her elementary schools, while Russia has only 4,193,594. This means that in Japan ninety-two children in every thousand study, and in Russia thirty-two in every thousand. Secondary schools and universities show equally striking figures. The Mission Field draws from this comparison the suggestion that missionaries sent to Japan must receive the highest possible education.

MR. A. B. LLOYD, of the C. M. S. Uganda Mission, writes joyously that the tide of evangelical teaching has spread from tribe to tribe, until now the way is open for an advance into the Sudan from the south. “Nearly all the big chiefs,” he says, “have sent messages begging me to send them teachers, and to come myself and live with them.” I hope in July to take up my abode in Acholiland in the Nile province of Uganda.

IN taking account of the forces at work in the universal foreign mission field, one may not overlook the Y. M. C. A. There are now three hundred associations in the mission fields, about one half of them in colleges and universities. In the Imperial University of Japan the association has a building for its own use. The Japan Y. M. C. A. is undertaking work among the soldiers at the front. Two prominent men in Seoul, Korea, are earnest supporters of the Y. M. C. A., but both are graduates of American universities, where the association blessed their student life.

IT is announced that slave raiding and slave dealing will be abolished in Hausa Land. Charles H. Robinson, one of the very few European travelers who have penetrated into Kano, the capital of this land, gives some facts that show the necessity of such a movement. In his most interesting and instructive book, “Hausa Land,” published in 1896, Mr. Robinson states that it is generally admitted that there are at least 15,000,000 Hausa-speaking people, and that of these 5,000,000 are slaves, or, as he forcibly puts it, “one out of every three hundred persons in the world is a Hausa-speaking slave”! There being scarcely any currency in this great country except cowries, which are too bulky for large transactions, it has become the custom to pay in slaves; so that when a merchant goes on a trading expedition, he takes with him a number of slaves, with whom to buy goods and to pay for the expenses of his journey. These slaves are not brought from distant, outlying countries, but by raiding neighboring villages and people of their own tribes. Thus there is always civil war in the land, especially as all the smaller kings have to pay a yearly tribute of slaves to the sultan of Sokoto.—Selected.