of
government, which, till the conquest of the Tartars in 1644, bore the
marks of the highest antiquity; their astronomical observations; and
their history.

Simply and purely patriarchal, every father was the magistrate in his
own family; and the emperor, who acted by his substitutes, the
Mandarins, was venerated and obeyed as the father of all. The most
passive submission to authority thus branched out was inculcated by
Confucius, and their other philosophers, as the greatest duty of
morality. But, if there is an age in sacred or profane history where the
manners of mankind are thus delineated, no superior antiquity is proved
by the form of Chinese government. Their ignorance of the very ancient
art of ingrafting fruit-trees, and the state of their language (like the
Hebrew in its paucity of words), a paucity characteristic of the ages
when the ideas of men required few syllables to clothe them, prove
nothing farther than the early separation of the Chinese colony{*} from
the rest of mankind; nothing farther, except that they have continued
till very lately without any material intercourse with the other nations
of the world.

{*} The Chinese colony! Yes, let philosophy smile; let her talk of the
different species of men which are found in every country; let her brand
as absurd the opinion of Montesquieu, which derives all the human race
from one family. Let her enjoy her triumph. Peace to her insolence,
peace to her dreams and her reveries. But let common sense be contented
with the demonstration (See Whiston, Bentley, etc.) that a creation in
every country is not wanted, and that one family is sufficient in every
respect for the purpose. If philosophy will talk of black and white men
as different in species, let common sense ask her for a demonstration,
that climate and manner of life cannot produce this difference; and let
her add, that there is the strongest presumptive experimental proof that
the difference thus happens. If philosophy draw her inferences from the
different passions of different tribes; let common sense reply, that
stripped of every accident of brutalization and urbanity, the human mind
in all its faculties, all its motives, hopes and fears, is most
wonderfully the same in every age and country. If philosophy talk of the
impossibility of peopling distant islands and continents from one
family, let common sense tell her to read Bryant's Mythology. If
philosophy asserts that the Kelts wherever the