CHINESE TO STUDY ENGLISH
IN THIS SUNDAY SCHOOL.
First Baptist Oriental Branch is Re-
organized and Fifteen China-
men Are Enrolled.
Chinese of Kansas City will have an opportunity of studying English hereafter, for the Chinese Sunday school of the First Baptist church was reorganized yesterday at the New Casino by H. S. Reardon, official interpreter of the superior court at New York. Mr. Reardon made an address to the scholars in their native tongue, explaining to them that it will henceforth be possible for them to get primary instruction in English before entering upon the more advanced study of the Bible. Heretofore the students had been instructed in English with the scriptures as the text and to the beginners the method was somewhat bewildering, as they did not even know the rudiments of the language. It was something like the situation of an American if he were set to read the works of Confucius in the original without approaching it with a primary course in Chinese.
The officers of the Sunday school are Miss Ruth Stewart, superintendent, and Miss Eva Anderson, assistant, and about fifteen scholars are enrolled.
Kansas City made a very favorable impression on Mr. Reardon, who has seen most of the world's great cities. Besides his experience as a traveler, he is a linguist of accomplishment, speaking English, French, Spanish and Portuguese fluently, in addition to Chinese. He has visited the larger part of Kansas City's Chinese population of which there are about seventy, and stated yesterday that he found conditions unusually satisfactory here. Especially he found a marked absence of gambling and other vices among local Chinamen, and he said that Kansas City was far ahead of other cities in that respect.
