. And these institutions work well. The
machinery is simple, but it produces a vast amount of happiness and
domestic virtue. While in most parts of Asia the people are oppressed by
petty tyrants, and ground down by taxes,--while they have no motive to
improve their condition, since every advance will only expose them to
greater extortion,--the people of China are industrious and happy. In no
part of the world has agriculture been carried to such perfection. Every
piece of ground in the cultivated parts of the empire, except those
portions devoted to ancestral monuments, is made to yield two or three
crops annually, by the careful tillage bestowed on it. The ceremony of
opening the soil at the beginning of the year, at which the emperor
officiates, originated two thousand years ago. Farms are small,--of one or
two acres,--and each family raises on its farm all that it consumes. Silk
and cotton are cultivated and manufactured in families, each man spinning,
weaving, and dyeing his own web. In the manufacture of porcelain, on the
contrary, the division of labor is carried very far. The best is made at
the village of Kiangsee, which contains a million of inhabitants. Seventy
hands are sometimes employed on a single cup. The Chinese are very
skilful in working horn and ivory. Large lanterns are made of horn,
transparent and without a flaw. At Birmingham men have tried with machines
to cut ivory in the same manner as the Chinese, and have failed.

Sec. 3. Life and Character of Confucius.

Of this nation the great teacher for twenty-three centuries has been
Confucius. He was born 551 B.C., and was contemporary with the Tarquins,
Pythagoras, and Cyrus. About his time occurred the return of the Jews from
Babylon and the invasion of Greece by Xerxes. His descendants have always
enjoyed high privileges, and there are now some forty thousand of them in
China, seventy generations and more removed from their great ancestor. His
is the oldest family in the world, unless we consider the Jews as a single
family descended from Abraham. His influence, through his writings, on the
minds of so many millions of human beings is greater than that of any man
who ever lived, excepting the writers of the Bible; and in saying this we
do not forget the names of Mohammed, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Luther.
So far as we can see, it is the influence of Confucius which has
maintained, though probably not originated, in China, that profound
rev