and folk-lore, and know the conditions and sources
of their earliest culture.
Many books have been written on China and its
people, and much useful and interesting informa
tion concerning both is scattered through them.
But the unwritten history of this people, stretch
ing back into centuries of myth and fable, would
fill a library. And to many of us, it is this un
written history, drawn from a very distant,
shadowy past, that is of far deeper interest than
the story of the life and customs of later times.
European nations have been in more or less in
timate commercial relations with China during
three hundred years. Yet the knowledge we pos
sess, of Chinese character, of the incentives to ac
tion, their course of reasoning or of the motives
which control or direct the conduct of a celestial.
under any given circumstances, is very small in
deed. Not only is the Chinese mental constitu
tion entirely different from our own, but the whole
Chinese nation is living in precisely the same con
dition of intellectual advancement that was at
tained by its philosophers and scholars a thousand
years ago.
This may be a rather startling declaration, but
it is true. Progress in thought ceased among Chi
nese scholars about that time, and stagnation has
prevailed ever since. Such a lamentable result
has followed the teachings. of some of China's
greatest philosophers, because they unwisely taught
a grave reverence for the writings of the ancient
sages. It is the study of the Chinese classics which
has restrained and dwarfed the great natural abili
ties of the Chinese student.
If we begin to trace out the earliest history of .
China, we are carried back to very remote days.
If the earliest monuments of ancient Egypt are a
few thousand years older than the beginning of
the Chinese Empire, the old emperors of the first
dynasty of China have still a very respectable an
tiquity. . The records tell us of the days of the
first Emperor, B. C., 3300. But even beyond this
semi-mythical period, we know that there were
many centuries, during which the ancestral Chi
THE FREE LANCE.
nese tilled the soil of Northern China, conquered
and replaced the savage aborigines, and slowly
laid the foundations of an Empire which, through
the changing fortunes of strife with enemies with
out and foes or traitors within, has maintained its
integrity and enlarged its boundaries, until the
Emperor of China now numbers as his sub
jects one-fourth the population of the globe.
Thus the unwritten history of China is very
long and eventful. Five thousand years have
passed since the ancestral Chinese—contemporaries
perhaps of the Babylonian Empire, and of those
other peoples whose ruined cities and carved in•
scriptions are buried in the alluvium of the Meso
potamian Valley—began their aimless eastward
wanderings, from the country somewhere about
the Persian Gulf. . We cannot trace their way
across the mountains and plateaus of Central Asia,
but the clew to their origin and ethnographical re
lations is found in the old and complex characters
of their written language, and there is no period
known in Chinese history when those people had
not a written language and necessarily an advanced
degree of culture. The foundations of the empire
were laid in wisdom and a recognized system of
moral teaching, which gave them great suprema
cy over the savage tribes around them.; and it is
these attainments in an age of very primitive
culture, more than any warlike spirit among the
Chinese, which has enabled them to maintain the
integrity of such a vast Empire through all the
vicissitudes of an eventful history.
We will leave the distant past with only one more
allusion, which is significant not only of.the per
manency of all Chinese institutions, but shows
how far back we must go to find the basis of the
high culture. which prevails to-day among the lit
erary classes of China, and also proves how very
deep-seated is the popular respect for learning.
An author who wrote zzoo years B. C., makes an
allusion to "village schools of the ancients."
From that remote period the Chinese, with but a
brief interval during the Han dynasty, have main-.
tained a system of village schools until the preSent