His two sons avenged Won Wang; they roused the people, recruited an army in their palatinate—­perhaps enlisted Huns too—­and swept away Chousin and his dynasty.  They called their new royal house after their native land, Chow; Wu Wang, the elder of the two, becoming its first king, and his brother the Duke of Chow, his prime minister.  I say king; for the title was now Wang merely; though there had been Hwangtis or Emperors of old.  Won Wang and his two sons are the second Holy Trinity of China; Yao, Shun, and Ta Yu being the first.  They figure enormously in the literature:  are stars in the far past, to which all eyes, following the august example of Confucius, are turned.  There is a little to be said about them:  they are either too near the horizon, or too little of their history has been Englished, for us to see them in their habit as they lived; yet some luster of real greatness still seems to shine about them.  It was the Duke of Chow, apparently, who devised or restored that whole Chinese religio-political system which Confucius revivified and impressed so strongly on the stuff of the ideal world—­for he could get no ruler of his day to establish it in the actualities—­that it lasted until the beginning of a new manvantara is shatter it now.  That it was based on deep knowledge of the hidden laws of life there is this (among a host of other things) to prove:  Music was an essential part of it.  When, a few years ago, the tiny last of the Manchu emperors came to the throne, an edict was published decreeing that, to fit him to govern the empire, the greatest care should be taken with his education in music.  A wisdom, truly, that the west has forgotten!

When William of Normandy conquered England, he rewarded his followers with fiefs:  in England, while English land remained so to be parceled out; afterwards (he and his successors) with unconquered lands in Wales, and then in Ireland. they were to carve out baronies and earldoms for themselves; and the Celtic lands thus stolen became known as the Marches:  their rulers, more or less independent, but doing homage to the king, as Lords Marchers.  The kings of Chow adopted the same plan.  Their old duchy palatinate became the model for scores of others.  China itself—­a very small country then—­southern Shansi, northern Homan, western Shantung—­was first divided up under the feudal system; the king retaining a domain, known as Chow, in Homan, for his own.  Then princes and nobles—­some of the blood royal, some of the old shang family, some risen from the ranks—­were given warrant to conquer lands for themselves from the barbarians beyond the frontier:  so you go rid of the ambitious, and provided Chow with comfortable buffers.  They went out, taking a measure of Chinese civilization with them, and conquered or cajoled Huns, Turks, Tatars, Laos, shans, Annamese, and all that kind of people, into accepting them for their rulers.  It was a work, as you may imagine, of centuries; with as