ce the
whole literary class in the principality of Tsi set to work exposing and
denouncing the conduct of Tsouichow, who soon perceived that his wiser
plan would be to reconstitute the Tribunal and to allow it to follow
its own devices."

Other stories to the same effect are told. They are very likely
exaggerated, but there is good reason to believe that the literary class
of China were obstinate to the verge of martyrdom in maintaining the
facts and traditions of the past, and that death signified to them less
than dishonor. We shall see a striking instance of this in the story of
Hoang-ti, the burner of the books.

In the period to which we have now come, China was far from being the
great empire it is to-day. On the south it did not extend beyond the
great river Yang-tse-Kiang, all the region to the south being still held
by the native tribes. On the north the Tartar tribes occupied the
steppes. At the fall of the Chow dynasty, in 255 B.C., the empire
extended through five degrees of latitude and thirteen of longitude,
covering but a small fraction of its present area.

And of this region only a minor portion could fairly be claimed as
imperial soil. The bulk of it was held by feudal princes, whose
ancestors had probably conquered their domains ages before, and some of
whom held themselves equal to the emperor in power and pride. They
acknowledged but slight allegiance to the imperial government, and for
centuries the country was distracted by internal warfare, until the
great Hoang-ti, whose story we have yet to tell, overthrew feudalism,
and for the first time united all China into a single empire.

The period that we have so rapidly run over embraces no less than two
thousand years of partly authentic history, and a thousand or more years
of fabulous annals, during which China steadily grew, though of what we
know concerning it there is little in which any absolute trust can be
placed. Yet it was in this period that China made its greatest progress
in literature and religious reform, and that its great lawgivers
appeared. With this phase of its history we shall deal in the succeeding
tale.

_CONFUCIUS, THE CHINESE SAGE._

In the later years of the Chow dynasty appeared the two greatest
thinkers that China ever produced, Laoutse, the first and ablest
philosopher of his race, and Confucius, a practical thinker and reformer
who has had few equals in the world. Of Laoutse we know little. Born 604
B.C.,