en upon a "black inn," which is
another name for a den of thieves. Still there have been many who
travelled for the sake of beautiful scenery, or in order to visit famous
spots of historical interest; not to mention the large body of officials
who are constantly on the move, passing from post to post.

Among those who believe that every nation must have reached its present
quarters from some other distant parts of the world, must be reckoned a
few students of the ancient history of China. Coincidences in language
and in manners and customs, mostly of a shadowy character, have led some
to suggest Babylonia as the region from which the Chinese migrated to
the land where they are now found. The Chinese possess authentic records
of an indisputably early past, but throughout these records there is
absolutely no mention, not even a hint, of any migration of the kind.

Tradition places the Golden Age of China so far back as three thousand
years before Christ; for a sober survey of China's early civilization,
it is not necessary to push further back than the tenth century B.C. We
shall find evidence of such an advanced state of civilization at that
later date as to leave no doubt of a very remote antiquity.

The China of those days, known even then as the Middle Kingdom, was
a mere patch on the empire of to-day. It lay, almost lozenge-shaped,
between the 34th and 40th parallels of latitude north, with the upper
point of the lozenge resting on the modern Peking, and the lower on
Si-an Fu in Shensi, whither the late Empress Dowager fled for safety
during the Boxer rising in 1900. The ancient autocratic Imperial system
had recently been disestablished, and a feudal system had taken its
place. The country was divided up into a number of vassal states of
varying size and importance, ruled each by its own baron, who swore
allegiance to the sovereign of the Royal State. The relations, however,
which came to subsist, as time went on, between these states, sovereign
and vassal alike, as described in contemporary annals, often remind the
reader of the relations which prevailed between the various political
divisions of ancient Greece. The rivalries of Athens and Sparta, whose
capitals were only one hundred and fifty miles apart--though a
perusal of Thucydides makes one feel that at least half the world was
involved--find their exact equivalent in the jealousies and animosities
which stirred the feudal states of ancient China, and in the