oice in the matter, the match being arranged by the parents
of the parties; the lifting of the bride's veil, so that the
bridegroom may see her face, is the very last act of the long and
complicated ceremony.

In the traditional Chinese social system four classes are
distinguished: the literary, the agricultural, the artisan and the
trading class. Hereditary nobility, in the European sense, scarcely
exists, and the possession of an hereditary title gives in itself no
special privileges. Official position is more highly esteemed than
birth and the bureaucracy takes the place of the aristocracy in the
west. There are, nevertheless, besides personal decorations for merit,
such as the yellow jacket, five hereditary rewards for merit; these
last only for a fixed number of lives. A few Chinese families,
however, enjoy hereditary titles in the full sense, the chief among
them being the Holy Duke of Yen (the descendant of Confucius). The
Imperial Clansmen consist of those who trace their descent direct from
the founder of the Manchu dynasty, and are distinguished by the
privilege of wearing a yellow girdle; collateral relatives of the
imperial house wear a red girdle. Twelve degrees of nobility (in a
descending scale as one generation succeeds another) are conferred on
the descendants of every emperor; in the thirteenth generation the
descendants of emperors are merged in the general population, save
that they retain the yellow girdle. The heads of eight houses, the
"Iron-capped" (or helmeted) princes, maintain their titles in
perpetuity by rule of primogeniture in virtue of having helped the
Manchu in the conquest of China. Imperial princes apart, the highest
class is that forming the civil service. (See also Sec. _Government and
Administration_.) The peasant class forms the bulk of the population.
The majority of Chinese are small landowners; their standard of living
is very low in comparison with European standards. This is in part due
to the system of land tenure. A parent cannot, even if he wished to do
so, leave all his land to one son. There must be substantially an
equal division, the will of the father notwithstanding. As early
marriages and large families are the rule, this process of continual
division and subdivision has brought things down to the irreducible
minimum in many places. Small patches of one-tenth or even
one-twentieth of an acre are