--

So Li Urh responded to the confusions of his day. Arguments?--
You could hardly call them so; there is very little arguing,
where Tao is concerned. The Tiger was abroad, straining all
those lithe tendons,--a tense fearful symmetry of destruction
burning bright through the night-forests of that pralaya:
grossest and wariest energies put forth to their utmost in a race
between the cunning for existence, a struggle of the strong for
power.--"It is the way of Tao to do difficult things when they
are easy; to benefit and not to injure; to do and not to
strive." Come out, says Laotse, from all this moil and topsey-
turveydom; stop all this striving and botheration; give things
a chance to right themselves. There is nothing flashy or to make
a show about in Tao; it vies with no one. Let go; let be;
find rest of the mind and senses; let us have no more of these
fooleries, war, capital punishment, ambition; let us have self-
emptiness. Just be quiet, and this great Chu Hia will come right
without aid of governing, without politics and voting and
canvassing and such.--_Here and Now_ and _What comes by_ were his
prescriptions. He was an advocate of the Small State. Aristotle
would have had no government ruling more than ten thousand
people; Laotse would have had his State of such a size that the
inhabitants could all hear the cocks crowing in foreign lands;
and he would have had them quite uneager to travel abroad. What
he taught was a total _bouleversement_ of the methods of his age.
"It is the way of Tao not to act from personal motives, to
conduct affairs--without feeling the trouble of them, to
taste without being aware of the flavor, to account the
great as the small and the small as the great, to recompense
injury with kindness."

The argument went all against him. Their majesties of Ts'in
and Tsin and Ts'i and Ts'u were there with their drums and
tramplings; the sixty warrior-carrying chariots were thundering
past;--who should hear the voice of an old quiet man in the Royal
Library? Minister This and Secretary That of Lu and Chao and
Cheng were at it with their wire-pullings and lobbyings and petty
diddlings and political cheateries--(it is all beautifully
modern); what had the world to do with self-emptiness and Tao?
The argument was all against him; he hadn't a leg to stand on.
There was no Tao; no simplicity; no magic; no Garden of Si
Wang Mu in the West; no Azure Birds of Compassion to fly out
from it