with Tonquin; the southern coast provinces,
and the lands towards Tibet. Ssema Tsien tells us that "mountains
were hewn through for many miles to establish a trade-route
through the south-west and open up those remote regions";
that was a scheme of Chang Ch'ien's, who had ever an eye to
penetrating to India.

There was a dark side to it. Vast sums of money were eaten up,
and estravagance in private life was encouraged. Says Ssema:

"From the highest to the lowest, everyone vied with his neighbor
in lavishing money on houses and appointments and apparel,
altogether beyond his means. Such is the everlasting law of the
sequence of prosperity and decay.... Merit had to give way to
money; shame and scruples of conscience were laid aside; laws
and punishments were administered with severer hand."

It is a very common thing to see signs of decline and darkness in
one's own age; and Ssema himself had no cause to love the
administration of Han Wuti; under which he had been punished
rather severely for some offense. Still, what he says is more or
less what you would expect the truth to be. And you will note
him historian of the life of the people; not mere recounter of
court scandals and chronicler of wars: conscious, too, of the
law of cycles;--all told, something a truer historian than we
have seen too much of in the West.--Where, indeed, we are wedded
to politics, and must have our annalists chronicle above all
things what we call political growth; not seeing that it is but
a circle, and squirreling round valiantly in a cage to get
perpetually in high triumph to the place you started from; a
foolish externality at best. But real History mirrors for us the
motions of the Human Spirit and the Eternal.

I said that what Ssema tells us is what you would expect the
truth to be; this way:--After half a cycle of that adventurous
and imaginative spirit, eyes jaundiced a little would surely find
excuse enough for querulous vision. There is, is there not,
something Elizabethan in that Chang Ch'ien, taking the vast void
so gaily, and not to be quenched by all those fusty years
imprisoned among the Huns, but returning only the more fired and
heady of imagination? If he was a type of Han Wuti's China, we
may guess Ssema was not far out, and that vaulting ambition was
overleaping itself a little; that men were buying automobiles
who by good rights should have ridden in a wheelbarrow. Things
did not go quite so well with th