He had, of course, a host of relatives; and precedent loomed large to tell him what to do with them:  the precedent of the dynasty-founders of old.  Nor were they themselves likely to have been backward in reminding him.  Wu Wang had come into possession of many feudal dominions, and had made of the members of his family dukes and marquises to rule them.  Ts’in Shi Hwangti’s empire was many times the size of Wu Wang’s; so he was in a much better position to reward the deserving.  We must remember that he was no heir to a single sovereignty, but a Napoleon with a Europe at his feet.  Ts’in and Ts’u and Tsin and the others were old-established kingdoms, with as long a history behind them as France or England has now; and that history had been filled with wars, mutual antagonisms and hatreds.  Chow itself was like an Italy before Garibaldi;—­with a papacy more inept, and holding vaguer sway:—­it had been at one time the seat of empire, and it was the source of all culture.  He had to deal, then, with a heterogeneity as pronounced as that which confronted Napoleon; but he was not of the stuff for which you prepare Waterloos.  No one dreamed that he would treat the world other than as such a heterogeneity.  His relations expected to be made the Jeromes, Eugenes, and Murats of the Hollands, Spains, and Sicilies to hand.  The world could have conceived of no other way of dealing with the situation.  But Ts’in Shi Hwangti could, very well.

He abolished the feudal system.  He abolished nationalities and national boundaries.  There should be no more Ts’in and Tsin and Ts’u; no more ruling dukes and marquises.  Instead, there should be an entirely new set of provinces, of which he would appoint the governors, not hereditary; and they should be responsible to him:  promotable when good, dismissable and beheadable on the first sign of naughtiness.  It was an idea of his own; he had no foreign history to go to for models and precedents, and there had been nothing like it in Chinese History.  Napoleon hardly conceived such a tremendous idea, much less had he the force to carry it out.  Even the achievement of Augustus was smaller; and Augustus had before him models in the history of many ancient empires.

Now what was the ferment behind this man’s mind;—­this barbarian —­for so he was—­of tremendous schemes and doings?  The answer is astonishing, when one thinks of the crude ruthless human dynamo he was.  It was simply Taoism: it was Laotse’s Blue Pearl;—­ but shining, of course, as through the heart of a very London Particular of Hunnish-barbarian fogs.  No subtleties of mysticism; no Chwangtsean spiritual and poetry-breeding ideas, for him!—­It has fallen, this magical Pearl, into turbid and tremendous waters, a natural potential Niagara; it has stirred, it has infected their vast bulk into active Niagarahood.  He was on fire for the unknown and the marvelous; could conceive of no impossible—­it should go hard, he thought, but that the subtler worlds that