India, encountering the vast epics of the Maha-Bharata and the
Ramayana;--we might naturally expect to find in far Cathay a still wilder
flight of the Asiatic Muse. Not at all. We drop at once from unbridled
romance into the most colorless prose. Another race comes to us, which
seems to have no affinity with Asia, as we have been accustomed to think
of Asia. No more aspiration, no flights of fancy, but the worship of
order, decency, propriety, and peaceful commonplaces. As the people, so
the priests. The works of Confucius and his commentators are as level as
the valley of their great river, the Yang-tse-kiang, which the tide
ascends for four hundred miles. All in these writings is calm, serious,
and moral They assume that all men desire to be made better, and will
take the trouble to find out how they can be made so. It is not thought
necessary to entice them into goodness by the attractions of eloquence,
the charm of imagery, or the fascinations of a brilliant wit. These
philosophers have a Quaker style, a dress of plain drab, used only for
clothing the thought, not at all for its ornament.

And surely we ought not to ask for any other attraction than the subject
itself, in order to find interest in China and its teachers. The Chinese
Empire, which contains more than five millions of square miles, or twice
the area of the United States, has a population of five hundred millions,
or half the number of the human beings inhabiting the globe. China proper,
inhabited by the Chinese, is half as large as Europe, and contains about
three hundred and sixty millions of inhabitants. There are eighteen
provinces in China, many of which contain, singly, more inhabitants than
some of the great states of Europe. But on many other accounts this nation
is deeply interesting.

China is the type of permanence in the world. To say that it is older than
any other _existing_ nation is saying very little. Herodotus, who has been
called the Father of History, travelled in Egypt about 450 B.C. He studied
its monuments, bearing the names of kings who were as distant from his
time as he is from ours,--monuments which even then belonged to a gray
antiquity. But the kings who erected those monuments were possibly
posterior to the founders of the Chinese Empire. Porcelain vessels, with
Chinese mottoes on them, have been found in those ancient tombs, in shape,
material, and appearance precisely like those which are made in China
to-day; and Rosell