Ts’in Shi Hwangti in his day had to meet a like opposition.  The wars had broken up the structure of society, but not the long tradition of refined learning.  That had always seemed the quarter from which light and leading must come; but it had long ceased to be a quarter from which light or leading could come.  Mencius had been used to rate and ridicule the ruling princes; and scholars now could not understand that Mencius and his ruling princes and all their order were dead.  They could not understand that they were not Menciuses, nor Ts’in Shi Hwangti a kinglet such as he had dealt with.  Now Mencius had been a great man,—­a Man’s son, as they say;—­and very likely he and Ts’in Shi Hwangti might have hit it off well enough.  But there was no Mencius, no Man’s son, among the literati now.  The whole class was wily, polite, sarcastic, subtle, unimaginative, refined to a degree, immovable in conservatism.  The Taoist teachers had breathed in a new spirit, but it had not reached them.  How would Ts’in Shi Hwangti, barbarian, wild Taoist, and man of swift great action, appear to them?

Of course they could not abide him; and had not the sense to fear.  They were at their old game of wire-pulling:  would have the feudal system back, with all the old inefficiency; in the name of Ta Yu and the Duke of Chow they would do what they might to undo the strivings of this Ts’in upstart.  So all the subtleties of the old order were arrayed against him,—­pull devil, pull baker.

He knew it; and knew the extreme difficulty of striking any ordinary blow to quiet them.  He had challenged Time Past to the conflict, and meant to win.  Time Future was knocking at the doors of the empire, and he intended it should come in and find a home.  His armies had crossed the Gobi, and smelt out unending possibilities in the fabulous west; they had opened up the fabulous south, the abode of Romance and genii and dragons.  It was like the discovery of the Americas:  a new world brought over the horizon.  His great minister, Li Ssu had invented a new script, the Lesser Seal, easier and simpler than the old one; Meng-tien, conqueror of the Gobi, had invented the camel’s-hair brush wherewith to write gracefully on silk or cloth, instead of difficultly with stylus on bamboo-strips as of old.  It was the morning stir of the new manvantara; and little as the emperor might care for culture, he heard the Future crying to him.  He heard, too, the opposing murmur of the still unconquered Past.  The literati stood against him as the Papacy against Frederick II of Sicily:  a less open opposition, and one harder to meet.