There could not be a number of sons of heaven because there were not a number of heavens.  The imperial sacrifices secured that all should be in order in the country, and that the necessary equilibrium between Heaven and Earth should be maintained.  For in the religion of Heaven there was a close parallelism between Heaven and Earth, and every omission of a sacrifice, or failure to offer it in due form, brought down a reaction from Heaven.  For these religious reasons a central ruler was a necessity for the feudal lords.  They needed him also for practical reasons.  In the course of centuries the personal relationship between the various feudal lords had ceased.  Their original kinship and united struggles had long been forgotten.  When the various feudal lords proceeded to subjugate the territories at a distance from their towns, in order to turn their city states into genuine territorial states, they came into conflict with each other.  In the course of these struggles for power many of the small fiefs were simply destroyed.  It may fairly be said that not until the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. did the old garrison towns became real states.  In these circumstances the struggles between the feudal states called urgently for an arbiter, to settle simple cases, and in more difficult cases either to try to induce other feudal lords to intervene or to give sanction to the new situation.  These were the only governing functions of the ruler from the time of the transfer to the second capital.

5 Changes in the relative strength of the feudal states

In these disturbed times China also made changes in her outer frontiers.  When we speak of frontiers in this connection, we must take little account of the European conception of a frontier.  No frontier in that sense existed in China until her conflict with the European powers.  In the dogma of the Chinese religion of Heaven, all the countries of the world were subject to the Chinese emperor, the Son of Heaven.  Thus there could be no such thing as other independent states.  In practice the dependence of various regions on the ruler naturally varied:  near the centre, that is to say near the ruler’s place of residence, it was most pronounced; then it gradually diminished in the direction of the periphery.  The feudal lords of the inner territories were already rather less subordinated than at the centre, and those at a greater distance scarcely at all; at a still greater distance were territories whose chieftains regarded themselves as independent, subject only in certain respects to Chinese overlordship.  In such a system it is difficult to speak of frontiers.  In practice there was, of course, a sort of frontier, where the influence of the outer feudal lords ceased to exist.  The development of the original feudal towns into feudal states with actual dominion over their territories proceeded, of course, not only in the interior of China but also on its borders, where the feudal territories had the advantage of more unrestricted