naturally occurred the battles
of Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae. Then lived Buddha-Gautama,
Lao-tsze, Ezekiel, Daniel, Haggai, Zechariah, Pythagoras, Pindar,
AEschylus and Anacreon.

The Chinese are linked to the past by ties of language and custom beyond
all other nations. They are a peculiar people, a chosen people, a people
set apart. Just when they withdrew from the rest of mankind and
abandoned their nomadic habits, making themselves secure against
invasion by building a wall one hundred feet high, and settled down to
lay the foundations of a vast empire, we do not know. Some historians
have fixed the date about ten thousand years before Christ--let it go at
that. There is a reasonably well-authenticated history of China that
runs back twenty-five hundred years before Christ, while our history
merges into mist seven hundred fifty years before the Christian era.

The Israelites wandered; the Chinese remained at home. Walls have this
disadvantage: they keep people in as well as shut the barbarians out.
But now there are vast breaches in the wall, through which the
inhabitants ooze, causing men from thousands of miles away to cry in
alarm, "the Yellow Peril!" And also through these breaches, Israelites,
Englishmen and Yankees enter fearlessly, settle down in heathen China,
and do business.

It surely is an epoch, and what the end will be few there are who dare
forecast.

* * * * *

This then is from the pen of Edward Carpenter, the Church of England
curate who was so great a friend and admirer of our own Walt Whitman
that he made a trip across the sea to join hands with him in preaching
the doctrine of democracy and the religion of humanity.

In the interior of China, along low-lying plains and great
river-valleys, and by lake-sides, and far away up into hilly and
even mountainous regions,

Behold! an immense population, rooted in the land, rooted in the
clan and the family,

The most productive and stable on the whole Earth. A garden one
might say--a land of rich and recherche crops, of rice and tea and
silk and sugar and cotton and oranges;

Do you see it?--stretching away endlessly over river-lines and
lakes, and the gentle undulations of the low-lands, and up the
escarpments of the higher hills;

The innumerable patchwork of civilization--the poignant verdure of
the young rice; the somber green of orang