half Hun herself, she had learned warfare in a
school forever in session. But she had had wise rulers also,
after their fashion of wisdom: who had been greatly at pains to
educate her in all the learning of the Chinese. So now she
stood, an armed camp of a nation, enamored of war, and completely
civilized in all external things. Ts'u, her strongest rival,
stretching southward to the Yangtse and beyond, had had to deal
with barbarians less virile than the Huns; and besides, dwelling
as Ts'u did among the mountains and forests of romance, she had
some heart in her for poetry and mysticism, whereas Ts'in's was
all for sheer fighting. Laotse probably had been a Ts'u man;
and also Chwangtse and Ch'u Yuan; and in after ages it was
nearly always from the forests of Ts'u that the great winds of
poetry were blown. Still--he had immense territories and
resources, and the world looked mainly to her for defense against
the northern Tiger Ts'in. Soon after Su Tai told his master the
parable of the mussel and the oyster-catcher the grand clash
came, and the era of petty wars and raidings was over. Ts'u
gathered to herself most of the rest of China for her allies, and
there was a giant war that fills the whole horizon, nearly, of
the first half of the third century B. C. New territories were
involved: the world had expanded mightily since the days of
Confucius. "First and last," says Ssema Tsien, "the allies
hurled a million men against Ts'in." But to no purpose; one
nation after another went down before those Hun-trained half-Huns
from the north-west. In 257 Chau Tsiang king of Ts'in took the
Chow capital, and relieved Nan Wang, the last of the Chows, of
the Nine Tripods of Ta Yu, the symbols of his sacred sovereignty;
--the mantle of the Caliphate passed from the House of Wen Wang
and the Duke of Chow.

The world had crumbled to pieces: there had been changes of
dynasty before, but never (in known history) a change like this.
The Chows had been reigning nearly nine hundred years; but their
system had been in the main the same as that of the Shangs and
Hias, and of Yao, Shun, and Ta Yu: it was two millenniums, a
century, and a decade old. A Chinaman, in Chau Tsiang's place,
would merely have reshaped the old order and set up a new
feudal-pontifical house instead of Chow; which could not
have lasted, because old age had worn the old system out.
But these barbarians came in with new ideas. A new empire,
a new race