interpenetrate this one should be as wonderful as this world under Ts’in Shi Hwangti.  Don’t argue with him; it is dangerous!—­certainly there was an Elixir of Life, decantable into goblets, from which Ts’in Shi Hwangti might drink and become immortal,—­the First August Emperor, and the only one forever!  Certainly there were those Golden Islands eastward, where Gods dispensed that nectar to the fortunate;—­out in your ships, you there, and search the waves for them!  And certainly, too, there were God knew what of fairylands and paradises beyond the western desert; out, you General Meng-tien, with your great armies and find them!  He did tremendous things, and all the while was thus dreaming wildly.  From the business of state he would seize hours at intervals to lecture to his courtiers on Tao;—­I think not in a way that would have been intelligible to Laotse or Chwangtse.  Those who yawned were beheaded, I believe.

How would such a prodigy in time appear to his own age?  Such cataclysmic wars as Ts’in had been waging for the conquest of China take society first, so to say, upon its circumference, smash that to atoms, and then go working inwards.  The most conservative and stable elements are the last and least affected.  The peasant is killed, knocked about, transported, enclaved; but when the storm is over, and he gets back to his plough and hoe and rice-field again, sun and wind and rain and the earth-breath soothe him back to and confirm in what he was of old:  only some new definite spiritual impulse or the sweep of the major cycles can change him much,—­and then the change is only modification.  At the other end of society you have the Intellectuals.  In England, Oxford is the home and last refuge of lost causes.  A literary culture three times as old as modern Oxford’s, as China’s was then, will be, you may imagine, fixed and conservative.  It is a mental mold petrified with age; the minds participating must conform to it, solidify, and grow harder in the matrix it provides than granite or adamant.  We have seen how in recent times the Confucian literati resisted the onset of westernism.  All these steam-engines and telegraphs seemed to them fearfully crude and vulgar in comparison with the niceties of literary style, the finesses of time-taking ceremonious courtesies, that had been to them and to their ancestors time out of mind the true refinements of life, and even the realities.  China rigid against the West was not a semi-barbarism resisting civilization, but an excessively perfected culture resisting the raw energies of one still young and, in its eyes, still with the taint of savagery:  brusque manners, materialistic valuations.