ciety, but not the long
tradition of refined learning. That had always seemed the
quarter from which light and leading must come; but it had long
ceased to be a quarter from which light or leading could come.
Mencius had been used to rate and ridicule the ruling princes;
and scholars now could not understand that Mencius and his ruling
princes and all their order were dead. They could not understand
that they were not Menciuses, nor Ts'in Shi Hwangti a kinglet
such as he had dealt with. Now Mencius had been a great man,--a
Man's son, as they say;--and very likely he and Ts'in Shi Hwangti
might have hit it off well enough. But there was no Mencius, no
Man's son, among the literati now. The whole class was wily,
polite, sarcastic, subtle, unimaginative, refined to a degree,
immovable in conservatism. The Taoist teachers had breathed in a
new spirit, but it had not reached them. How would Ts'in Shi
Hwangti, barbarian, wild Taoist, and man of swift great action,
appear to them?

Of course they could not abide him; and had not the sense to
fear. They were at their old game of wire-pulling: would have
the feudal system back, with all the old inefficiency; in the
name of Ta Yu and the Duke of Chow they would do what they might
to undo the strivings of this Ts'in upstart. So all the
subtleties of the old order were arrayed against him,--pull
devil, pull baker.

He knew it; and knew the extreme difficulty of striking any
ordinary blow to quiet them. He had challenged Time Past to the
conflict, and meant to win. Time Future was knocking at the
doors of the empire, and he intended it should come in and find a
home. His armies had crossed the Gobi, and smelt out unending
possibilities in the fabulous west; they had opened up the
fabulous south, the abode of Romance and genii and dragons. It
was like the discovery of the Americas: a new world brought over
the horizon. His great minister, Li Ssu had invented a new
script, the Lesser Seal, easier and simpler than the old one;
Meng-tien, conqueror of the Gobi, had invented the camel's-hair
brush wherewith to write gracefully on silk or cloth, instead of
difficultly with stylus on bamboo-strips as of old. It was the
morning stir of the new manvantara; and little as the emperor
might care for culture, he heard the Future crying to him. He
heard, too, the opposing murmur of the still unconquered Past.
The literati stood against him as the Papacy against Frederick II