Page:The History of Ink.djvu/78

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72
THE HISTORY OF INK.

tsee, a mythical personage unmentioned in the history of China until the contents of the New Testament had been made known there,—and that—many ages after the date of his supposed life and death.

But for their derivation and appropriation or theft of the great arts from the West, the Chinese and all Oriental nations, from the Euphrates to the Pacific, including the Japanese, would have remained to this day in the condition in which the Mexicans and Peruvians were found by the Spanish and Italian robbers who first explored the Western Hemisphere, and murdered its inhabitants for their land, and the fruits and the gold and silver of that land.

Whatever arts the Chinese or Japanese or Jesuits may have invented or preserved the art of telling the truth is evidently, to all of them, one of "the lost arts,"—lost irretrievably and forever!