lden Islands eastward, where Gods
dispensed that nectar to the fortunate;--out in your ships, you
there, and search the waves for them! And certainly, too, there
were God knew what of fairylands and paradises beyond the western
desert; out, you General Meng-tien, with your great armies and
find them! He did tremendous things, and all the while was thus
dreaming wildly. From the business of state he would seize hours
at intervals to lecture to his courtiers on Tao;--I think _not_
in a way that would have been intelligible to Laotse or Chwangtse.
Those who yawned were beheaded, I believe.

How would such a prodigy in time appear to his own age? Such
cataclysmic wars as Ts'in had been waging for the conquest of
China take society first, so to say, upon its circumference,
smash that to atoms, and then go working inwards. The most
conservative and stable elements are the last and least affected.
The peasant is killed, knocked about, transported, enclaved; but
when the storm is over, and he gets back to his plough and hoe
and rice-field again, sun and wind and rain and the earth-breath
soothe him back to and confirm in what he was of old: only some
new definite spiritual impulse or the sweep of the major cycles
can change him much,--and then the change is only modification.
At the other end of society you have the Intellectuals. In
England, Oxford is the home and last refuge of lost causes. A
literary culture three times as old as modern Oxford's, as
China's was then, will be, you may imagine, fixed and conservative.
It is a mental mold petrified with age; the minds participating
must conform to it, solidify, and grow harder in the matrix
it provides than granite or adamant. We have seen how in
recent times the Confucian literati resisted the onset of
westernism. All these steam-engines and telegraphs seemed to
them fearfully crude and vulgar in comparison with the niceties
of literary style, the finesses of time-taking ceremonious
courtesies, that had been to them and to their ancestors time out
of mind the true refinements of life, and even the realities.
China rigid against the West was not a semi-barbarism resisting
civilization, but an excessively perfected culture resisting the
raw energies of one still young and, in its eyes, still with the
taint of savagery: brusque manners, materialistic valuations.

Ts'in Shi Hwangti in his day had to meet a like opposition. The
wars had broken up the structure of so