independent of foreign aid in its development, than any other. She has been the mother of arts, sciences, and letters, to the races on every side of her; and the world at large she has affected not a little, mainly through the material products of her ingenuity and industry. Repeatedly subjected to foreign domination, she has always vanquished her conquerors, compelling them implicitly to adopt her civilization, and respect and maintain her institutions. That she now at last seems to have become in a measure superannuated and effete, and to be nearing her downfall, under the combined pressure of overcrowded population, a detested foreign yoke and internal rebellion against it, and the disorganizing interference of Western powers, may be true; but it does not become us to regard otherwise than with compassion the final decay of a culture which, taking into account the length of its duration and the number of individuals affected by it, has perhaps spread as much light and made as much happiness as any other that ever existed.
The representative man of China is Confucius, who lived in the sixth century before Christ. He is no religious teacher, but an ethical and political philosopher. In him the wisdom of the olden time, the national apprehension of the meaning and duties of life, found its highest expression, which has been accepted as authoritative by all succeeding ages. He determined how much of the ancient literature should be saved from oblivion: his excerpts from it, historical and poetical, together with his own writings, and the works of his pupils, in which are handed down his own instructions in public and private virtue, form nearly the whole of the Five King and the Four Books, the national classics, the earliest and most revered portion of the national literature. Their continuation and elaboration have engaged no insignificant part of the literary activity of following generations. But, aside from this, almost every department of mental productiveness is represented in China by hosts of works, ancient and modern: in history, in biography, in geography and ethnology, in jurisprudence, in the grammar and lexicography especially of their own tongue, in natural history and science, in art and industry, in the various branches
