much history going forward as during any centuries you might name.  The states thus formed were young, compared to China; and as China grew old and weak, they grew into their vigorous prime.  The infinity of human activities that has been!  These Chow ages seem like the winking of an eye; but they were crowded with great men and small, great deeds and trivialities, like our own.  The time will come when our ‘Anglo-Saxon’ history will be written thus:  England sent out colonies, and presently the colonies grew stronger and more populous than England;—­and it will be enough, without mention of the Pitts and Lincolns, the Washingtons and Gladstones, that now make it seem so full and important.

By 850 the balance of power had left or was leaving the Chow king at Honanfu.  His own subjects had grown unwarlike, and he could hardly command even their allegiance; for each man’s feudal duty was first to his own duke, marquis, earl, viscount, or baron;—­ strangely enough, there were those five degrees of nobility in ancient China as in modern England.  Of these nobles, each with his court and feudal dominion, there were in what we may call China Proper some unascertainable number between thirteen and a hundred and fifty:  mostly small and insignificant, but mostly, too, full of schemes and ambitions.

But it was the Lords Marchers that counted.  One after another of them had wrested from the Chow the title of Wang or King; it was not enough for them to be dukes and marquises.  Then came a time when a sort of Bretwalda-ship was established; to be wielded by whichever of them happened to be strongest—­and generally to be fought for between whiles:  a glorious and perpetual bone of contention.  International law went by the board.  The Chow domain, the duchies and marquisates, lay right in the path of the contestants—­midmost of all, and most to be trampled.  Was Tsin to march all round the world, when a mere scurry across neutral (and helpless) Chow would bring it at the desired throat of Ts’u?—­A question not to be asked!—­there at Honanfu sat the Chow king, head of the national religion, head of the state with its feudatories, receiving (when it suited them to pay it) the annual homage of all those loud and greedy potentates, who for the rest kicked him about as they pleased, and ordered each other to obey him,—­for was he not still the son of Heaven, possessor of the Nine Tripods of sovereignty, the tripods of Ta Yu?—­So the centuries passed, growing worse and worse ever, from the ninth to the sixth:  an age of anarchy, bad government, disorder, crime and clash of ambitions:  when there was a decline of virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice in the world;—­and we know what manner of incarnation, at such times, is likely to happen.

Conditions had outgrown the astral molds made for them in the last manvantara:  the molds that had been made for a small homogeneous China.  The world had expanded, and was no longer homogeneous:  China herself was not homogeneous; and she found on all sides of her very heterogeneous Ts’ins, Tsins, Ts’is, Ts’us, Wus and Yuehs; each of whom, like so many Great Powers of our own times, had the best of intentions to partake of her sacramental body when God’s will so should be.—­Indeed, the situation was very much as we have seen it.