Thus the political institutions of China are built on literature.  Knowledge is the road to power and wealth.  All the talent and knowledge of the nation are interested in the support of institutions which give to them either power or the hope of it.  And these institutions work well.  The machinery is simple, but it produces a vast amount of happiness and domestic virtue.  While in most parts of Asia the people are oppressed by petty tyrants, and ground down by taxes,—­while they have no motive to improve their condition, since every advance will only expose them to greater extortion,—­the people of China are industrious and happy.  In no part of the world has agriculture been carried to such perfection.  Every piece of ground in the cultivated parts of the empire, except those portions devoted to ancestral monuments, is made to yield two or three crops annually, by the careful tillage bestowed on it.  The ceremony of opening the soil at the beginning of the year, at which the emperor officiates, originated two thousand years ago.  Farms are small,—­of one or two acres,—­and each family raises on its farm all that it consumes.  Silk and cotton are cultivated and manufactured in families, each man spinning, weaving, and dyeing his own web.  In the manufacture of porcelain, on the contrary, the division of labor is carried very far.  The best is made at the village of Kiangsee, which contains a million of inhabitants.  Seventy hands are sometimes employed on a single cup.  The Chinese are very skilful in working horn and ivory.  Large lanterns are made of horn, transparent and without a flaw.  At Birmingham men have tried with machines to cut ivory in the same manner as the Chinese, and have failed.

Sec. 3.  Life and Character of Confucius.

Of this nation the great teacher for twenty-three centuries has been Confucius.  He was born 551 B.C., and was contemporary with the Tarquins, Pythagoras, and Cyrus.  About his time occurred the return of the Jews from Babylon and the invasion of Greece by Xerxes.  His descendants have always enjoyed high privileges, and there are now some forty thousand of them in China, seventy generations and more removed from their great ancestor.  His is the oldest family in the world, unless we consider the Jews as a single family descended from Abraham.  His influence, through his writings, on the minds of so many millions of human beings is greater than that of any man who ever lived, excepting the writers of the Bible; and in saying this we do not forget the names of Mohammed, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Luther.  So far as we can see, it is the influence of Confucius which has maintained, though probably not originated, in China, that profound reverence for parents, that strong family affection, that love of order, that regard for knowledge and deference for literary men, which are fundamental principles underlying all the Chinese institutions.  His minute and practical system of morals, studied as it is by all the learned, and constituting the sum of knowledge and the principle of government in China, has exerted and exerts an influence on that innumerable people which it is impossible to estimate, but which makes us admire the power which can emanate from a single soul.