00 to 50 B. C. there was an orgy of war in
which Republican Rome passed away forever, and out of which
Caesar emerged World-Master. Caesar's triumph came just two
centuries after Ts'in Shi Hwangti's accession; Kublai Khan the
Turanian, who smashed China, came just about as much before
Mohammed II the Turanian, who swept away the last remnant of Rome.

In the first cycles of the two there is a certain difference in
procedure. In China, a dawn twilight of half a cycle, sixty-five
years, from the fall of Chow to the Revival of Literature under
the second Han, preceded the glorious age of the Western Hans.
In Rome, the literary currents were flowing for about a half-cycle
before the accession of Augustus: that half-cycle formed a
dawn-twilight preceding the glories of the Augustan Age.

It was just when the reign of Han Wuti was drawing towards a
sunset a little clouded,--you remember Ssema Ts'ien's strictures
as to the national extravagance and its results,--that the
Crest-Wave egos began to come in in Rome. Cicero, eldest of
the lights of the great cycle of Latin literature, would have
been about twenty when Han Wuti died in 86. We counted the
first "day" of the Hans as lasting from 194 (the Revival of
the Literature) to the death of Han Wuti's successor in 63;
in which year, as we saw, Augustus was born. During the next
twenty years the Crest-Wave was rolling more and more into
Rome: where we get Julius Caesar's career of conquest;--
it was a time filled with wine of restlessness, and, you may
say, therewith 'drunk and disorderly.' Meanwhile (from 61
to 49) Han Suenti the Just was reigning in China. His "Troops
of justice" became, after a while, accustomed to victory;
but in defensive wars. Here it was a time of sanity and order,
as contrasted with the disorder in Rome; of pause and reflexion
compared with the action and extravagance of the preceding
Chinese age. It was Confucian and ethical; no longer Taoist
and daringly imaginative; Confucianism began to consolidate
its position as the state system. So in England Puritan
sobriety followed Elizabethanism. Han Wuti let nothing impede
the ferment of his dreams: Han Suenti retrenched, and walked
quietly and firmly. His virtues commanded the respect of Central
Asia: the Tatars brought him their disputes for arbitration,
and all the regions west of the Caspian sent him tribute.
China forwent her restless and gigantic designs, and took
to quietude and grav