A town almost for its population.
A population denser, on a large scale, than anywhere else on earth—
Five or six acre holdings, elbowing each other, with lesser and larger, continuously over immense tracts, and running to plentiful market centers;
A country of few roads, but of innumerable footpaths and waterways.
Here, rooted in the land, and rooted in the family, each family clinging to its portion of ancestral earth, each offshoot of the family desiring nothing so much as to secure its own patrimonial field,
Each member of the family answerable primarily to the family assembly for his misdeeds or defalcations,
All bound together in the common worship of ancestors, and in reverence for the past and its sanctioned beliefs and accumulated prejudices and superstitions;
With many ancient, wise, simple customs and ordinances, coming down from remote centuries, and the time of Confucius,
This vast population abides—the most stable and the most productive in the world.