China | Page 3

charge of a State has a
heavy task. The happiness of his subjects absolutely depends upon him.
To provide for everything is his duty; his ministers are only put in
office to assist him," and also that "a prince who wishes to fulfill his
obligations, and to long preserve his people in the ways of peace, ought
to watch without ceasing that the laws are observed with exactitude."
They were stanch upholders of temperance, and they banished the
unlucky discoverer of the fact that an intoxicating drink could be
obtained from rice. They also held fast to the theory that all
government must be based on the popular will. In fact, the reigns of
Yao, Chun and Yu are the ideal period of Chinese history, when all
questions were decided by moral right and justice, and even now
Chinese philosophers are said to test their maxims of morality by the
degree of agreement they may have with the conduct of those rulers.
With them passed away the practice of letting the most capable and
experienced minister rule the State. Such an impartial and reasonable
mode of selecting the head of a community can never be perpetuated.
The rulers themselves may see its advantages and may endeavor as
honestly as these three Chinese princes to carry out the arrangement,
but the day must come when the family of the able ruler will assert its
rights to the succession, and take advantage of its opportunities from its
close connection with the government to carry out its ends. The
Emperor Yu, true to the practice of his predecessors, nominated the

president of the council as his successor, but his son Tiki seized the
throne, and became the founder of the first Chinese dynasty, which was
called the Hia, from the name of the province first ruled by his father.
This event is supposed to have taken place in the year 2197 B.C., and
the Hia dynasty, of which there were seventeen emperors, ruled down
to the year 1776 B.C. These Hia princes present no features of interest,
and the last of them, named Kia, was deposed by one of his principal
nobles, Ching Tang, Prince of Chang.
This prince was the founder of the second dynasty, known as Chang,
which held possession of the throne for 654 years, or down to 1122 B.C.
With the exception of the founder, who seems to have been an able
man, this dynasty of twenty-eight emperors did nothing very
noteworthy. The public morality deteriorated very much under this
family, and it is said that when one of the emperors wanted an honest
man as minister he could only find one in the person of a common
laborer. At last, in the twelfth century before our era, the enormities of
the Chang rulers reached a climax in the person of Chousin, who was
deposed by a popular rising headed by Wou Wang, Prince of Chow.
This successful soldier, whose name signifies the Warrior King,
founded the third Chinese dynasty of Chow, which governed the
empire for the long space of 867 years down to 266 B.C. During that
protracted period there were necessarily good and bad emperors, and
the Chow dynasty was rendered specially illustrious by the appearance
of the great social and religious reformers, Laoutse, Confucius and
Mencius, during the existence of its power. The founder of the dynasty
instituted the necessary reforms to prove that he was a national
benefactor, and one of his successors, known as the Magnificent King,
extended the authority of his family over some of the States of
Turkestan. But, on the whole, the rulers of the Chow dynasty were not
particularly distinguished, and one of them in the eighth century B.C.
was weak enough to resign a portion of his sovereign rights to a
powerful vassal, Siangkong, the Prince of Tsin, in consideration of his
undertaking the defense of the frontier against the Tartars. At this
period the authority of the central government passed under a cloud.
The emperor's prerogative became the shadow of a name, and the last

three centuries of the rule of this family would not call for notice but
for the genius of Laoutse and Confucius, who were both great moral
teachers and religious reformers.
Laoutse, the founder of Taouism, was the first in point of time, and in
some respects he was the greatest of these reformers. He found his
countrymen sunk in a low state of moral indifference and religious
infidelity which corresponded with the corruption of the times and the
disunion in the kingdom. He at once set himself to work with energy
and devotion to repair the evils of his day, and to raise before his
countrymen a higher ideal of duty. He has been called the Chinese
Pythagoras, the most erudite of sinologues have