Such in brief outline is the Chinese Educational Mission to the United States. The head and front of the whole marvellous enterprise, humanly speaking, is Commissioner Yung Wing. While others whose cooperation was indispensable, have, as will presently appear, contributed to it and still stand back of it, and justly share the credit of it with him, to him more than to any other man beside, probably more than to all other men beside, its existence is due. Its history, thus far, cannot be better told except in that connection, so intimately are the two histories related. But it becomes one who speaks of Yung Wing to observe the principle that we must be modest for a modest man, for so modest a man as he is is rare to find. He was born in 1828, of a worthy family in humble life, near the city of Macao in Southern China. In the year 1839 he became a pupil in a children’s school, opened by Mrs. Gutzlaff, the wife of an English missionary, his parents consenting to it in the idea that it would be a profitable thing for him to learn the English language. Proving a bright scholar, he was in time promoted to the Morrison School, an institution founded by English merchants in Macao and named after Robert Morrison, the first English Protestant, but at this time under charge of the Rev. S. R. Brown, a teacher engaged by the Morrison Educational Society. When later this school was transferred to Hong Kong he went with it, and remained in it till he came to this country. He suffered, however, during this time serious interruption by the death of his father, which required him to go home and, a boy that he was, assist in the support of his family. This he did by wages earned in the printing establishment of a Portuguese Roman Catholic mission in Macao.
In 1847, Mr. Brown, who had long noted his patient ardor in study, the marks of ability he showed and a certain original vigor of will and strength of character that were in him, brought him, at the age of sixteen,