So ancient China is to be seen now only as through a glass darkly; if his great attempt had been quite successful, it would not be to be seen at all.  His crimes made no karma for China; they are not a blot on her record;—­since they were done by an outside barbarian,—­a mere publican and Ts’inner.  From our standpoint as students of history, he was a malefactor of the first order; even when you take no account of his ruthless cruelty to men;—­and so China has considered him ever since.  Yet Karma finds ruthless agents for striking its horrible and beneficial blows; (and woe unto them that it finds!).  It seems that Ts’in Shi Hwangti did draw the bowstring back—­by this very wickedness,—­far back—­that sent the arrow China tearing and blazing out through the centuries to come.  The fires in which the books were burned were the pyre of the Phoenix,—­the burning of the astral molds,—­the ignition and annihilation of the weight and the karma of two millenniums.  The Secular Bird was to burn and be consumed to the last feather, and be turned to ashes utterly, before she might spring up into the ether for her new flight of ages.

One wonders what would happen if a Ts’in Shi Hwangti were to arise and do by modern Christendom what this one did by ancient China.  I say nothing about the literati, but only about the literature.  Would burning it be altogether an evil?  Nearly all that is supremely worth keeping would live through; and its value would be immensely enhanced.  First the newspapers would go, that sow lies broadcast, and the seeds of national hatreds.  The light literature would go, that stands between men and thought.  The books of theology would go, and the dust of creedalism that lies so thick on men’s minds.  A thousand bad precedents that keep us bound to medievalism would go with the law-books:  there would be a chance to pronounce, here and now as human beings, on such things as capital punishment;—­which remains, though we do not recognise the fact, solely because it has been in vogue all these centuries, and is a habit hard to break with.  History would go; yes;—­but a mort of pernicious lies would go with it.  Well, well; one speaks of course in jest (partly).  But when all is said, China was not unfortunate in having a strong giant of a man, a foreigner withal, at her head during those crucial decades.  Ts’in Shi Hwangti guarded China through most of that perilous intermission between the cycles.  It was the good that he did that mostly lived after him.

In 210 he fell ill, took no precautions, and died,—­in his fiftieth year.  A marvelous mausoleum was built for him:  a palace, with a mountain heaped on top, and the floor of it a map of China, with the waters done in quicksilver.  Whether his evil deeds were interred with his bones, who can say?—­certainly his living wives were, and the thousands of living workmen who had built the mausoleum.  Ts’innish doings, not Chinese.  In the Book of Odes, Confucius preserved a Ts’in ballad mourning over men so buried alive with their dead king.