anslated to the Chinese
as a fine man in some respects--considering--but, unfortunately!
too fond of the pleasures of the table; "a gluttonous man
and a winebibber "?

They were stirring times, indeed; when all boundaries were in
flux, and you needed a new atlas three times a year. Robbers
would carve themselves new principalities overnight; kingdoms
would arise, and vanish with the waning of a moon. What would
this, or any other country, become, were law, order, the police
and every restraining influence made absolutely inefficient?
Were California one state today; a dozen next week; in July six
or seven, and next December but a purlieu to Arizona?--Things,
heaven knows, are bad enough as they are; there is no dearth of
crime and cheatery. Still, the police and the legal system do
stand between us and red riot and ruin. In China they did not;
the restraints had been crumbling for two or three centuries.
Human nature, broadly speaking, is much of a muchness in all
lands and ages: I warrant if you took the center of this world's
respectability, which I should on the whole put in some suburb of
London;--I warrant that if you relieved Clapham,--whose crimes,
says Kipling very wisely, are 'chaste in Martaban,'--of police
and the Pax Britannica for a hundred years or so, lurid Martaban
would have little pre-eminence left to brag about. The class
that now goes up primly and plugly to business in the City day by
day would be cutting throats a little; they would be making life
quite interesting. Their descendants, I mean. It would take
time; Mother Grundy would not be disthroned in a day. But it
would come; because men follow the times, and not the Soul; and
are good as sheep are, but not as heroes. So in Chow China.

But the young Confucius knew his history. He looked back from
that confusion to a wise Wu Wang and Duke of Chow; to a Tang the
Completer, whose morning bath-tub was inscribed with this motto
from _The New Way:_ "If at any time in his life a man can make a
new man of himself, why not every morning?" Most of all he
looked back to the golden and sinless age of Yao and Shun and Yu,
as far removed from him, nearly, as pre-Roman Britain is from us:
he saw them ruling their kingdom as a strong benevolent father
rules his house. In those days men had behaved themselves:
natural virtue had expressed itself in the natural way. In good
manners; in observation of the proprieties, for example.--In
that wild M