Pericles was seventeen years old when Confucius died. Themistocles was preparing the way for Pericles; for then was being collected the treasure of Delos, which made Phidias and the Parthenon possible. During the life of Confucius lived Leonidas, Miltiades, Cyrus the Great, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes. And then quite naturally occurred the battles of Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylæ. Then lived Buddha-Gautama, Lao-tsze, Ezekiel, Daniel, Haggai, Zechariah, Pythagoras, Pindar, Æschylus and Anacreon.
The Chinese are linked to the past by ties of language and custom beyond all other nations. They are a peculiar people, a chosen people, a people set apart. Just when they withdrew from the rest of mankind and abandoned their nomadic habits, making themselves secure against invasion by building a wall one hundred feet high, and settled down to lay the foundations of a vast empire, we do not know. Some historians have fixed the date about ten thousand years before Christ—let it go at that. There is a reasonably well-authenticated history of China that runs back twenty-five hundred years before Christ, while our history merges into mist seven hundred fifty years before the Christian era.
The Israelites wandered; the Chinese remained at home. Walls have this disadvantage: they keep people in as well as shut the barbarians out. But now there are vast breaches in the wall, through which the inhabitants ooze, causing men from thousands of miles away to cry in alarm, "the Yellow Peril!" And also through these breaches, Israelites, Englishmen and Yankees enter fearlessly, settle down in heathen China, and do business.
It surely is an epoch, and what the end will be few there are who dare forecast.
his then is from the pen of Edward Carpenter, the Church of England curate who was so great a friend and admirer of our own Walt Whitman that he made a trip across the sea to join hands with him in preaching the doctrine of democracy and the religion of humanity.
In the interior of China, along low-lying plains and great river-valleys, and by lake-sides, and far away up into hilly and even mountainous regions,
Behold! an immense population, rooted in the land, rooted in the clan and the family,
The most productive and stable on the whole Earth. A garden one might say—a land of rich and recherche crops, of rice and tea and silk and sugar and cotton and oranges;
Do you see it?—stretching away endlessly over river-lines and lakes, and the gentle undulations of the low-lands, and up the escarpments of the higher hills;