for the sovereign to win a class or a caste to his personal support, and to fill all offices with his creatures. Of classes and castes there were none; neither rank, nor dignity, nor authority, were hereditary. If it were desired, in recompense of extraordinary merit, to extend to the family of the meritorious individual the favors shown to himself, the Chinese have always been used to confer dignity, not on his descendants, but upon his ancestors; an ingenious and happy device, which it is most unfortunate that western nations have not imitated. Surely, an aristocracy is not necessary to the stability of the institutions of a country, if the most populous empire in the world has been able to subsist for four thousand years without a noble. The Chinese officials do indeed form a terrible bureaucracy, uplifted above the heads of the people in virtue of the delegation to their hands of part of the heaven-derived authority of the nation's father, proud of their position and presuming upon it, and often weighing heavily upon their plebeian countrymen; yet their general independence of the Emperor, and sympathy with the nation, are assured by the fact that their ranks are recruited directly from the mass of the people, and by a process which really brings, in the main, the best talent of the country to the management of its affairs. It is well known that for ages past the incumbents of office in China have been taken exclusively from the so-called lettered class; the class of those who, having been thoroughly instructed in the various branches of Chinese learning, have exhibited, in a strict competitive examination, the highest capacity and the profoundest acquirements. Access to this examination is denied to no one; the career of honors and dignities is open to every individual in the empire who has the requisite talent and industry. In this provision, and in the primary munici pal institutions already referred to above, there is laid a foundation of real democratic equality, and one of no little depth. and firmness, for the fabric of absolutism to rest upon. And the general result has been, that the empire has been governed under a system of laws of rare wisdom, equity, and humanity, which need not shrink from a comparison with those of the most favored epochs of the most enlightened nations in the

world. When the Chinese have suffered under tyrannical oppression, it has been from the abuse of absolute power, exercised arbitrarily and in contravention of law. Against this they have reserved to themselves but a single remedy, and that is, the right of rebellion. When matters have been borne with to the utmost, when the corruption or imbecility of the reigning dynasty, and the impossibility that the nation should be happy under its charge, are evident beyond dispute, then it is assumed that the commission of heaven has been withdrawn; pretenders to the virtually vacant office start up, and he who succeeds in crowding himself into the throne, and setting successfully in motion the machine of state, is accepted anew as the nation's parent and absolute lord.

It is not difficult to see the consistency between a political constitution like this, and the form and condition of the national religion, as we have described it. The family being the norm of the state, and the parental relation being held in the highest respect in the one as in the other, it was the more natural and easy to maintain the popular worship of the ancestors: this was hardly more than a transfer of the filial submission, attention, and reverence, always paid to the living parents, to their departed spirits. In the patriarchal state, again, there is no distinct separation of religious from political functions; both belong alike to the head of the family, and to his delegated representatives. The Chinese, indeed, can hardly be said ever to have established a distinction between religious, moral, and political principles, acts, and duties. All were alike incumbent upon the individual, and necessary to the well-being of society; why should they be severed from one another?

We cannot forbear calling attention once more to the fundamental traits of the Chinese character, as displayed in their system of government: the simplicity, the primitiveness in the common order of historical succession, of their form of polity; and, on the other hand, the magnificence of the development which it received, as applied to regulate the affairs of a vast and cultivated empire, instead of the petty concerns of a feeble tribe, or aggregate of tribes, such as those among whom we generally find that form prevailing, and the high meas

ure of success which attended its workings. It never produced a separation of the people into privileged and unprivileged classes, with the discontent and heart-burning, the arrogance on one side and abjectness on the other, which are wont to result from such a separation. The distinction of wealth and poverty, and such others as seem to inhere in the very constitution of human society, did indeed exist in China, as elsewhere, and produced enough of practical inequality; but the law did nothing to aggravate or perpetuate it. Nor did the system degenerate into one of organized oppression, or of galling interference with individual rights. Not a little of personal freedom was enjoyed under it. The individual was left at liberty to go and come, to follow what course of life he would; he was protected in the acquisition and the enjoyment of wealth. There was wanting only that he should be fenced about with those safeguards against arbitrary violence on the part of his rulers, without which civil liberty, as we understand it, does not exist; but this was a want of which he himself, at least, was not conscious; he neither knew nor dreamed of a better system than that under which he lived. Such we believe to have been, in their main features, the institutions of China at the time of the appearance of Confucius. We have already briefly characterized the nature of the work which he undertook with reference to them. He came, not to overthrow, but to establish; not to reform, but to restore. He came to rouse the conscience of the nation, and to recall it to the fulfillment of known duty, and the practice of acknowledged virtue; to rescue the national institutions from the destruction with which they were threatened, by selfseeking rapacity on the one side and insubordination on the other, and by the general corruption of morals and manners. He came to give to the national ideas their highest, clearest, and most authoritative expression, that the nation might never forget or neglect them. He was not a religious teacher, because the national spirit, of which he was the reflection, was by no means religious. At his time, indeed, even the modicum of religious faith which had found its expression in the ancient religion seems to have nearly died out, and the

ceremonies both of official and private worship to have become the forms which they have since continued to be, tenaciously adhered to and faithfully practiced, but no longer representing a living belief. Confucius accepted these ceremonies, and enjoined their careful observance, but, as it seems, from no higher regard for them than as they formed a part of the system under which virtue had flourished, and happiness reigned, in the ancient times of the empire. He expressly declined to meddle with matters lying beyond the present world and mortal life, in words identical in spirit with those of the famous couplet of Pope. "While I know so little of myself, iny fellow beings, and the world which I see about me," he says, "how should I venture to carry my inquiries beyond them?" Accordingly, he bases his system upon no alleged revelation of a divine will; he derives for it no support from the retributions and recompenses of a future state of existence; he reads the will of Heaven only in the love of right and justice and virtue inherent in the human mind, and in the dependence upon these of the happiness of the individual and the welfare of society. These principles he lays down broadly and faithfully enough; the simplicity, dignity, and purity of his moral teachings are unsurpassed. He makes no pretension to metaphysical profundity, or to subtlety of casuistical reasoning: the results he arrives at are reached directly, by the intuition of an enlightened mind and a benevolent heart; they are stated aphoristically, and the sympathy, rather than the intellectual acumen, of the disciple, are trusted to for a favorable response. He contents himself with laying down guiding principles, not following out their application into all the details of life and action.

It would be an ungrateful task to criticise the work of Confucius, and dwell with reprobation upon what he did not accomplish. In the most important point of all he is above the reach of criticism: he did all that was in him to do; so far as we are able to judge him, he was as sincere, as devoted, as disinterested, as any of those who are numbered among the world's great teachers. His deficiencies may be summed up in a word: he was Chinese, and Chinese only. But it is on that very account that his influence over his countrymen has

been so unbounded. That it has been for good, too, and almost only for good, does not admit of question. That the Chinese system found at that time so noble and unexceptionable an expression was a matter of no slight moment to the nation. It was a critical period in their history. A philosophy specious in appearance, but corrupt at the core, and which cunningly adapted itself to the salient features of the Chinese character, might then have won currency, to promote powerfully the disorganization of society, and to bring down the permanent ruin of the empire. The influence of the Confucian doctrine, on the contrary, has been in a high degree conservative; it has contributed its full share toward the wonderful longevity of the Chinese state. The nation, on its part, deserves not a little credit for having implicitly accepted, and faithfully adhered to, a system of teachings of so pure and elevated a character. Their adoption of it, as we have already seen, was complete. For two thousand years the Confucian doctrines have been the moral basis of the whole fabric of Chinese thought and action. The works which contain them have been the invariable text-books, by and from which each successive generation has been educated. To appreciate the significance of this fact, we need to note the special importance of the sys. tem of instruction in a country where instruction is so general and so highly considered, and where eminence in learning is the path to honor and authority; where the educated are the only aristocracy, and form the class from which are drawn the rulers of the nation. And farther, we need to note the peculiar character of the process of education in China; how that, owing to the great difficulty of the written language, more and maturer years are devoted to it than with us; how that, by the intense and prolonged toil which the student is compelled to devote to his text-books, in order to answer the requirements of the system of examinations, the native energy of his mind is impaired, and he becomes rather mastered by their contents than himself master of them. All the educated intellect of China has been thus imbued with Confucianism; even those have been schooled in it who were votaries of other religions than that of the state. As the Bible underlies all the