It ie probable that the world at large knows less about the history of China than of that of any contemporary State, snd it cares as little as it knows, For this there are, no doubt, sufficient reasons. Chinese history is remote, it is monotonous, obscure, and warse than definite period of, say, twenty-seven hundred years of authentic records to be examined, not to speak of half as long a period which may be regarded as semi-historical, or mythical, It is not the strangeness of the names of persons and of places which cools the zeal of Occidental students of Chinese historical annals, but the more or less conscious sense of violence done to one's intuitions of causality, as well as to the legitimate desire for finality. We wish to know why events happened, and when they did happen what of it, Yet these are precisely the things upon which the unhappy inquirer finds most difficulty in securing enlightenment. The modern conception that history, like everything else, is a development from within arising out of influences from without, almost of necessity involves the idea of progress. But progress is just that which the student of Chinese history has most difficulty in finding. An ordinary Chinese dynasty resembles a 300-year clock which at last with great difficulty sue~ ceeds in getting itself wound up and set a-going. Nobody can tell its tick or its time from the tick and the time of its predecessors, now gone to the serap-heap, and for the very good reason that in principle there is no difference, Each of these is more or less (generally more) out of line with the " Way of Heaven," but that is expected, and the Chinese can put up with much.
But when the hands get caught, when the gearing is evidently losing one by one its cogs, when the weights rattle in their boxes and the wrong hours keep striking—these are recognized signs of coming dissolution. When the people too go on strike and after years and decades of welter they suc-coed in setting up another time-piece to embody for them the path of Hearen,—when at length it also gets to running smoothly it is apparently the same old machine reincarnated.
This is Chinese history—the founders of the Han, the T'ang, the Sung and the Ming were all men of exceptional ability to wrestle with chaos, But between them what is the essential difference, and where is there any progress A Chinese will not improbably assure you that there was none, and was not meant to be any. What was desired was a return to the hoary ideas of " Yao and Shun." But the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.