The quite irrelevant ground that Carothers assigns to 
explaining the earlier Chinese indifference to industrialism is 
that Chinese writing—or printing—requires much erudition for 
its understanding. The same is true in varying degrees of all 
non-alphabetic forms of writing. The comment of Latourette on 
this point will help here as well as later:

     The greater part of the voluminous literature in Chinese 
     has been written in the classical style . . . The Chinese 
     classical language presents difficulties. It is highly 
     artificial. It is often replete with allusions and quotations 
     and to appreciate and even to understand much of it the 
     reader has to bring to it a vast store of knowledge of 
     existing literature . . . It is only by going through a 
     prodigious amount of literature and especially by 
     memorizing quantities of it that the scholar obtains a