plates and dishes of pottery; had for transit boats, carts and chariots,* wheelbarrows I suppose, and “cany wagons light.”  They had a system of writing, the origin of which was lost in remote antiquity; a large literature, of which fragments remain.  They were home-loving, war-hating, quiet, stagnant, cunning perhaps, quite un-enterprising; they lived in the valley of the Hoangho, and had not discovered, or had forgotten, the Yangtse to the south of them, and the sea to the east.  They might have their local loyalties and patriotism of the pork-barrel, and a certain arrogance of race:  belief in the essential superiority of the Black-haired People to the barbarians on their borders; but no high feeling for Chu Hia—­ All the Chinas;—­no dream of a possible national union and greatness.  Some three hundred of their folk-ballads come down to us, which are as unlike the folk-ballads of Europe as may be.  They do not touch on the supernatural; display no imagination; there are no ghosts or fairies; there is no glory or delight in war; there is no glory in anything;—­but only an intense desirability in home,—­in staying at home with your family, and doing your I work in the fields.  And nothing of what we should call romance, even in this home-love:  the chief tie is that between parents and children, not that between husband and wife, and still less that between lovers.  There is much moralizing and wistful sadness.—­Such was the life of the peasants; at the other pole was the life of the courts:  intrigue and cunning, and what always goes with cunning—­ineptitude; a good measure of debauchery; some finicking unimportant refinement; each man for self and party, and none for Gods and Men.  We have to do, not with the bright colors of the childhood of a race, but with the grayness of its extreme old age.  Those who will may argue that you can have old age with never a prime, youth, or childhood behind it.  Some say that Laotse was born at sixty-one, or seventy, or eighty-two years old—­a few decades more or less are not worth bothering about—­whence his name lao tse, the old son (but tse may also mean Teacher or Philosopher).  But I misdoubt the accuracy of such accounts, myself.  I think it likely he was a baby to begin with, like the majority of us.  And I imagine his country had been young, too, before she grew old;—­as young as America, and as vigorous.

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* Chinese Literature: Giles;—­whence also much else in
these articles.
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Among such a people, how much should you expect to find of the Sacred Mysteries?—­There were the Nine Tripods of Ta Yu with the king at Honanfu, to say that his kinghood had behind it symbolic sanctions; there was the Book of Changes; there was the system of the Duke of Chow, more dishonored in the breach than honored in the observance....  For the rest, you might as well look for the Eleusinia in Chicago.  Who could believe in religion, those days?—­Well;