In the summer of 1921, the Communist world was preparing for the first major conference of Far Eastern peoples. This conference was originally scheduled for Irkutsk in the late summer or early fall of that year. It was intended as a sequel to the Baku Conference of September 1920, which had been attended mainly by delegates from the Middle East. But it was also planned as the Soviet answer to the Washington Conference, as is well known. Competition between the Soviet Union and the United States for the support of the Asian people can be dated from this time, although initially Moscow was much more aware of this fact than Washington.

It is a fact of singular note that in nineteenth century China the vast majority of the educated classes either passively or actively rejected Christianity. Passively, they did so by remaining coldly indifferent to Christianity's message; the percentage of officials and literati who embraced the foreign religion was infinitesimally small. Actively, they expressed their hostility by writing and disseminating inflammatory anti-Christian literature; creating countless stumbling blocks for the Christian missionary; issuing threats of retaliation against any who dared enter the religion or have dealings with its foreign transmitters; and by the direct instigation of, and participation in, anti-Christian riots.

It is an essential feature of merit bureaucracy that there must exist within the institutional framework of government some method of guaranteeing that fixed standards of recruitment, promotion, and discipline are applied without discrimination to all members, or potential members, of the public services. In the Federation of Malaya, as in most Commonwealth countries, institutional machinery intended to satisfy this requirement of merit bureaucracy takes the form of public service commissions. It is the purpose of this study to trace the development of these institutions in Malaya, to outline briefly the organization, composition, and procedures of the commissions, to point out social and political factors in Malaya which affect the application of the principles underlying the institutional machinery, and to comment on the future of the service commissions in the Federation.

The study of the Tibetan religious institution, usually regarded as the province of Orientalists, Sanskritists, and students of comparative religion, has much of value to offer the social scientist. The institution represents a striking demonstration of a cultural force that has defied the dominant cultural patterns of China and India, under whose political authority a major portion of the religion's followers live. Simultaneously, the institution has united in a distinctively Tibetan cultural pattern many disparate groups, such as the Lepcha of Sikkim and to an extent even the revitalized Buddhist Newars of Nepal, whose original cultures resembled that of either their tribal or Hindu neighbors. Into this institution are woven nomadic pastoralists and urban craftsmen, slash-and-burn agriculturalists and people engaged in international trade, world-travellers and serfs bound to the land, brigands and saintly mystics. Rather than Tibet and its monasteries being an isolated geographic and cultural “refuge” area, the study of this key institution reveals a far more dynamic picture.

Education on western lines began in India by the middle of the nineteenth century with the establishment of a few high schools and colleges in the larger cities of Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, and Poona. The three oldest universities in India, those at the “Presidency” capitals of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay were incorporated in 1858 and the first graduates in arts and law came out soon thereafter. Normally most of the arts graduates entered the middle ranks of the administrative services and received, according to the standards of the times, relatively attractive remuneration. Also, they were greatly respected in the middle class society of those days. The law graduates also did well as advocates and lower grade judges, and a few even won such coveted posts as seats on the benches of the High Courts.