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I. ANCIENT HISTORY, I7
is the certain issue sooner or later of eve W monarchical
succession, jealousy, hatred, strife and internecine warfare,
with their exhausting exactions in men and means, the
depleting of the land, and the despair of the race was the
inevitable outcome. In but little more than three centuries
the power of the nobles exceeded that of the Emperor,
and with every succeeding century this power, and the
disorder it naturally involved, reduced the Empire to
a band of warring States with a merely nominal head,
to whom the haughty nobles gave scarce a sfiow of
allegiance.
It was now, when the nation had well nigh reached
the nadir of its political degradation that it also attained
to the zenith of its intellectual development, in the pro-
duction of the three great philosophers of the Far East,
Confucius, Mencius and Laocius. The mysticism of
Laotzfi, the morals, religion and politics of K'ungtz_,
and the literary polish of Mengtz_, all which came into
existence during this the Augustan age of China, while
lacking the insight and brilliance of contemporary philosophy
in the West, record the highest point in the arc of this
nation's genius.
That these three have not been surpassed is no sign
that they will not be so by their successors of the present
age. Even the Christ taught H_s disciples, "Greater
things than these shall ye do," and what the Chinaman
-of to-day, oppressed with the deadweight of his ancient
masters, needs is to reali_ that he too is capable of equal
or greater t!_ings than they. NevertheIess in these three
we behold what is the limit of China's unaided intellect,