nd holding
vaguer sway:--it had been at one time the seat of empire, and it
was the source of all culture. He had to deal, then, with a
heterogeneity as pronounced as that which confronted Napoleon;
but he was not of the stuff for which you prepare Waterloos. No
one dreamed that he would treat the world other than as such a
heterogeneity. His relations expected to be made the Jeromes,
Eugenes, and Murats of the Hollands, Spains, and Sicilies to
hand. The world could have conceived of no other way of dealing
with the situation. But Ts'in Shi Hwangti could, very well.

He abolished the feudal system. He abolished nationalities and
national boundaries. There should be no more Ts'in and Tsin and
Ts'u; no more ruling dukes and marquises. Instead, there should
be an entirely new set of provinces, of which he would appoint
the governors, not hereditary; and they should be responsible to
him: promotable when good, dismissable and beheadable on the
first sign of naughtiness. It was an idea of his own; he had no
foreign history to go to for models and precedents, and there had
been nothing like it in Chinese History. Napoleon hardly
conceived such a tremendous idea, much less had he the force
to carry it out. Even the achievement of Augustus was smaller;
and Augustus had before him models in the history of many
ancient empires.

Now what was the ferment behind this man's mind;--this barbarian
--for so he was--of tremendous schemes and doings? The answer is
astonishing, when one thinks of the crude ruthless human dynamo
he was. It was simply _Taoism:_ it was Laotse's Blue Pearl;--
but shining, of course, as through the heart of a very London
Particular of Hunnish-barbarian fogs. No subtleties of
mysticism; no Chwangtsean spiritual and poetry-breeding ideas,
for him!--It has fallen, this magical Pearl, into turbid and
tremendous waters, a natural potential Niagara; it has stirred,
it has infected their vast bulk into active Niagarahood. He was
on fire for the unknown and the marvelous; could conceive of no
impossible--it should go hard, he thought, but that the subtler
worlds that interpenetrate this one should be as wonderful as
this world under Ts'in Shi Hwangti. Don't argue with him; it is
dangerous!--certainly there was an Elixir of Life, decantable
into goblets, from which Ts'in Shi Hwangti might drink and become
immortal,--the First August Emperor, and the only one forever!
Certainly there were those Go