SECT. II.
THE NÊI 𝖅EH.
477
it was taught to use the right hand. When it was able to speak, a boy (was taught to) respond boldly and clearly; a girl, submissively and low. The former was fitted with a girdle of leather; the latter, with one of silk[1].
- ↑ The account which follows this of the teaching and training of
the brothers and sisters is interesting; and we may compare it with
what is said in volume iii, p. 350, of the different reception given to
sons and daughters in the royal family, though the distinction
between them is not accentuated here so strongly. The passage
treats of the children in a family of the higher classes, but those of
the common people would be dealt with in a corresponding manner
according to their circumstances. And even in the early feudal
times the way was open for talent and character to rise from the
lower ranks in the social scale, and be admitted to official
employment. The system of competitive examinations was even then
casting a shadow before. To number the days was, and is, a more
complicated affair in China than with us, requiring an acquaintance
with all the terms of the cycle of sixty, as well as the more
compendious method by decades for each month. The education of a
boy, it will be seen, comprehended much more than what we call
the three Rs. The conclusion of paragraph 33 gives the translator
some difficulty. Zottoli has—"et petet exerceri lectionibus
sermonisque veiitate," and my own first draft was—"he would ask to
be exercised in (reading) the tablets, and in truthful speaking."
But it is making too much of the boys of ancient China to represent
them as anxious to be taught to speak the truth. The meaning
of the concluding characters, as given in the text, is that assigned to
them by Kǎng Hsüan.
There is nothing in what is said of the daughters to indicate that they received any literary training. They were taught simply the household duties that would devolve on them in their state of society; though among them, be it observed, were the forms and provision for sacrifice and worship. It will be observed, also, at how early an age all close intercourse between them and their brothers came to an end, and that at ten they ceased to go out from the women's apartments. On what is said about the young men marrying at the age of thirty I have spoken in a note on page 65.
