Then, as now (or recently), China was old, inert, tired, and unwarlike; must depend on her cunning, and chiefly on their divisions, for what protection she might get against the rapacious and strong.  She was dull, sleepy and unimaginative, and wanted only to be left alone; yet teemed, too, with ambitious politicians, each with his sly wires to pull.  Her culture, ancient and decrepit, was removed by aeons from all glamor of beginnings.—­For a good European parallel, in this respect, you might go to Constantinople in the Middle Ages, when it hung ripe on the bough, so to say, and waiting to fall into Latin, Turkish, Bulgar, or even Russian jaws, whichever at the psychic moment should be gaping and ready beneath.  There too was the sense of old age and sterility; of disillusionment; of all fountains and inspirations run dry.—­In ancient Grecce, it was no such far cry back from the essential modernity of Pericles’ or of Plato’s time to the antiquity of Homer’s.  In India, the faery light of an immemorial dawn mingles so with the facts of history that there is no disentangling myth from matter-of-fact; if you should prove almost any king to have reigned quite recently, his throne would still be somehow set in the mellow past and near the fountains of time.  Augustan Rome, modern in all its phases, stands not so far in front of a background peopled with nymphs and Sibyls:  a past in which the Great Twin Brothers might fight at Lake Regillus, and stern heroes make fantastic sacrifices for Rome.  Even modern Europe is much less modern than Medieval Constantinople or Chow China.  We can breathe still the mysterious atmosphere of the Middle Ages; you shall find still, and that not in remote countries only, fairy-haunted valleys; a few hours out from London, and you shall be in the heart of druidry, and among peoples whose life is very near to Poetry.  But China, in those first pre-Confucian centuries, was desperately prosaic:  not so much modern, as pertaining to an ugly not impossible future.  Antiquity was far, far away.  The dawn with its glow and graciousness; noon and the prime with their splendor, were as distant and unimaginable as from our Amercan selves the day when Charlemain with all his peers went down.  If you can imagine an American several hundred years from now—­one in which Point Loma had never been; several hundred years more unromantic than this one; an America fallen and grown haggard and toothless; with all impulse to progress and invention gone; with centrifugal tendencies always loosening the bond of union; advancing, and having steadily advanced, further from all religious sanctions, from anything she may retain of the atmosphere of mystery and folklore and the poetry of racial childhood; you may get a picture of the mental state of that China.  A material civilization, with (except in war areas) reasonable security of life and goods, remained to her.  Her people lived in good houses, wore good clothes, used chairs and tables, chopsticks,