ancestors did," the people argued; "and since they
obeyed the ancestors of our present sovereign, we have to be loyal to
him." Interference with this time-honoured belief would have amounted to
a rupture, as it were, in the nation's religious relations, and as long
as the people looked upon the emperor as the Son of Heaven, his moral
power would outweigh strong armies sent against him in rebellion. The
time came soon enough when central power depended merely on this
spontaneous loyalty.

Not all the successors of Wu-wang profited by the lessons given them by
past history. Incapacity, excessive severity and undue weakness had
created discontent and loosened the relations between the emperor and
his vassals. Increase in the extent of the empire greatly added to this
decline of central power. For the emperor's own dominion was centrally
situated and surrounded by the several confederate states; its
geographical position prevented it from participating in the general
aggrandisement of China, and increase in territory, population and
prestige had become the privilege of boundary states. Tatar tribes in
the north and west and the aboriginal Man barbarians in the south were
forced by warfare to yield land, or enticed to exchange it for goods, or
induced to mingle with their Chinese neighbours, thus producing a mixed
population combining the superior intelligence of the Chinese race with
the energetic and warlike spirit of barbarians. These may be the main
reasons which gradually undermined the Imperial authority and brought
some of the confederate states to the front, so as to overshadow the
authority of the Son of Heaven himself, whose military and financial
resources were inferior to those of several of his vassals. A few out of
the thirty-five sovereigns of the Chou dynasty were distinguished by
extraordinary qualities. Mu-wang of the 10th century performed journeys
far beyond the western frontier of his empire, and was successful in
warfare against the Dog Barbarians, described as the ancestors of the
Hiung-nu, or Huns. The reign of Suean-wang (827-782 B.C.) was filled with
warfare against the Tangutans and the Huns, called Hien-yuen in a
contemporaneous poem of the "Book of Odes"; but the most noteworthy
reign in this century is that of the lascivious Yu-wang, the
oppressiveness of whose government had caused a bard represented in the
"Book of Odes" to complain about the emperor's evil ways. The writer of
this poem refer