and will have none of it.  But there is the fact:  you can leave your full purse in the streets of Chung-tu, and pick it up unrifled when you pass next; you can pay your just price, and get your just measure for it, fearing no cheateries; High Cost of Living is gone; corners in this and that are no more; graft is a thing you must go elsewhere to look for;—­there is none of it in Chung-tu.  And graft, let me say, was a thing as proper to the towns of China then, as to the graftiest modern city you might mention.  The thing is inexplicable—­but perfectly attested.  Not quite inexplicable, either:  he came from the Gods, and had the Gloves of Gwron on his hands:  he had the wisdom you cannot fathom, which meets all events and problems as they come, and finds their solution in its superhuman self, where the human brain-mind finds only dense impenetrability.—­Marquis Ting saw and wondered.—­“Could you do this for the whole state?” he asked.—­“Surely; and for the whole empire,” said Confucius.  The Marquis made him, first Assistant-Superintendent of Works, then Minister of Crime.

And now you shall hear Chapter X of the Analects, to show you the outer man.  All these details were noted down by the love of his disciples, for whom nothing was too petty to be recorded; and if we cannot read them without smiling, there is this to remember:  they have suffered sea-change on their way to us:  sea-change and time-change.  What you are to see really is:  (1) a great Minister of State, utterly bent on reproving and correcting the laxity of his day, performing the ritual duties of his calling—­as all other duties—­with a high religious sense of their antiquity and dignity; both for their own sake, and to set an example. what would be thought of an English Archbishop of Canterbury who behaved familiarly or jocularly at a Coronation Service?—­(2) A gentleman of the old school, who insists on dressing well and quietly, according to his station.  That is what he would appear now, in any grade of society, and among men the least capable of recognising his inner greatness:  ‘race’ is written in every feature of his being; set him in any modern court, and with half an eye you would see that his family was a thousand years or so older than that of anyone else present, and had held the throne at various times.  Here is a touch of the great gentleman:  he would never fish with a net, or shoot at a bird on the bough; it was unsportsmanlike. (3) A very natural jovial man, not above “changing countenance” when fine meats were set on his table:—­a thing that directly contradicts the idea of a cold, ever play-acting Confucius.  A parvenu must be very careful; but a scion of the House of Shang, a descendant of the Yellow Emperor, could unbend and be jolly without loss of dignity;—­and, were he a Confucius, would.  “A gentleman,” said he, “is calm and spacious”; he was himself, according to the Analects, friendly, yet dignified; inspired awe, but not fear; was respectful, but easy.  He divided mankind into three classes:  Adepts or Sages; true Gentlemen; and the common run.  He never claimed to belong to the first, though all China knows well that he did belong to it.  He even considered that he fell short of the ideal of the second; but as to that, we need pay no attention to his opinion.  Here, then, is Chapter X: